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AviatorsBot - A Telegram Bot for Weather Updates and Calculations

Hi Fabian, great work! For the sake of laziness (of the user), would it be possible to let your bot calculate data for an airfield based on metar/taf of another airfield, i.e. for airfields without weather data? For instance, let your bot calculate the density altitude for Hohenems LOIH based on weather data from St.Gallen LSZR?
Input for instance as “da loih lszr”?

LSZF Birrfeld, LFSB Basel-Mulhouse, Switzerland

Or select the nearest automatically. Possibly with a user override.

ELLX

You could do some of what the Autorouter bot does (we do need backups for everything in flying) e.g.

radar – delivers the current image extracted from meteox.com (latest)
sferics – as above, from http://en.blitzortung.org/live_lightning_maps.php?map=10
satir – as above, from https://en.sat24.com/en/eu/infraPolair (latest)

The problem with serving big objects like these images, say 50-100k, is that it tends to not work when airborne, unless flying really low down, say below 2000ft. And, I find with the Autorouter bot, if say I type

wx egkk egka eghi
radar

then the whole lot arrives 3 hours later after I landed But the tafs and metars only might have got through on a brief appearance of a signal.

Other stuff gets more tricky and requires a lot more work e.g. AIP plate delivery requires a lot of scripting. This is the full list

Supported commands:
/EOBT <HHMM> – delay or bring forward next flight plan to hour and minute UTC.
/CANCEL – cancel the next flight plan.
/DEPARTURE <HHMM>|NOW – send departure message at hour and minute UTC.
/ARRIVAL <HHMM> – send arrival message at hour and minute UTC.
/FREEZE – freeze slot improvements.
/UNFREEZE – restore slot improvements.
/WX <ICAO> – METAR/TAF for airport with given ICAO ID.
/BPACK – get briefing pack flight plan or route (add HELP for details)
/PLANS – list active flight plans, number can be given to EOBT/CANCEL/BPACK/ARRIVAL
/ROUTES – list last 5 routes, number can be given to GRAMET ROUTE
/NEAR <ICAO|address> – get METAR/TAF near ICAO airport or address
/NOTAM <ICAO> – NOTAMs for airport/FIR (add ordinal for details)
/AIRPORT – lookup airport information (add HELP for details)
/PLATES – AIP plates
/SUBSCRIBE – subscription management
/GRAMET – vertical route profile
/SIGMET – European SIGMET
/SFERICS – lightning strikes
/RADAR – rain radar
/SATIR – infrared satellite
/MSLP – mean sea level pressure analysis
/SIGWX – significant weather
/TEMSI [FRANCE] – TEMSI forecast Europe or France
/AIRSPACES – Active airspace information
/GAFORSLOVENIA – Slovenian GAFOR
/RADARSLOVENIA – Slovenian rain radar
/SWC – Significant Weather Charts (HELP for more)
/WEBCAM – Retrieve webcam image from select airfields
/DWD – German Met Office products (subscription required)
/NOP – Eurocontrol network status
Send your location for METAR/TAF in the vicinity.
More information: https://www.autorouter.aero/wiki/instant-messenger-interface/

Most of it is relevant only if you are managing flight plan filing, which you are not. Some of it e.g. airport notams, involves a bit of work and possibly using undocumented interfaces. The /nop looks very useful (for when e.g. French ATC is on strike ) but the image is too small to see

For a real tour de force (that’s all the French I know ) you could get the client location (probably not possible via telegram) and display a georeferenced meteox image. This was done on one private website (a browser on a mobile device can obtain the device’s GPS location, if permitted) but I never got it working properly.

If you get too far into this stuff you will need to do a lot of maintenance, which is best avoided on a free site…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

One can voluntarily send one’s location to any other Telegram user (including a bot), as well as share one’s location for a set amount of time. So you could georeference based on the last recent location sent to the bot.

ELLX

Cool app, subscribe function is useful !

Safe landings !
EDLN, Germany

One can voluntarily send one’s location to any other Telegram user (including a bot), as well as share one’s location for a set amount of time. So you could georeference based on the last recent location sent to the bot.

Sure; I use the Send Location all the time, but this would not work well for a georeferenced wx image in flight, because by the time the next brief connection is established, etc, the plane has probably travelled 100nm.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

xwind command parallel runways issue
@Anders could you please tell me which airport had this issue, I’d like to investigate it further?
If the airport has parallel runways with exactly the same heading the runway should only appear once in the xwind command.
A different runway name is used as a safety feature if the runways true course in openAIP doesn’t match the runway name within 10 degrees, so if you see this, the xwind is actually off by how much the runway number is off.

Some background: I had this issue with one airfield already, since according to the openAIP spec all runway headings should be true courses, therefore I am also using a model of the worlds magnetic variation, calculating the runway number based upon its magnetic course to make sure that the openAIP data is actually correct. Some people seem to have entered magnetic courses instead of true courses for the runway leading to this issue.

Austrocontrol data
@Snoopy Technically yes, but this is a licensing issue.

Radar and further functionality
@Peter I would love to include radar images. From my understanding the meteox image is based upon post processed satellite data?
Since windy implemented a weather radar overlay for Europe I have quite a comprehensive list of radar data available within Europe.

There is an interesting thread with radar data sources in the windy community forums:
https://community.windy.com/topic/3746/radar-data-needed-help-us-with-the-data-gathering
And the sources list of the app RainViewer:
https://www.rainviewer.com/sources.html

What I also learned is that there is actually an official European radar composite out there:
http://eumetnet.eu/activities/observations-programme/current-activities/opera-radar-animation/

Which is really neat. Only issue: It costs 80 000 EUR per year. Which is orders of magnitude outside of my budget.
Which is a sad reminder of the state of things when it comes to open data and especially weather data within Europe. I’ll probably add Nexrad though, since I am also flying in the US and it might be useful to others too.

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

Weather data for da and xwind for another airfield
@MikeWhiskey and @lionel I am doing a bit of this right now: If an airfield doesn’t have an altimeter setting the one of the nearest airfield which has one is used.
For the temperature and dew point it would be more critical since these could be vastly different while the altimeter setting would probably be off by 1-3 hPa at most.
So I still have to think how to handle this. For example if you have an airfield nearby which is only 10km away but has an elevation difference of 1500ft and another one which is 12km away but at almost the same elevation it would be better to use this one and so on.
And so far I am also using the station elevation of the decoded METAR, which the NOAA provides as the elevation of the airport since I figured that this data is probably more reliable than the openAIP data.

Fly for your dreams
LOAV

Tried it today, cool app. Just one question: Why not use ordinary SMS?

Last Edited by LeSving at 29 Aug 16:02
The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

SMS costs a lot of money to send – at least a few p per message. It would then have to involve a prepaid account of some sort…

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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