The Map

🇮🇱 עברית

The map

The map is the whole app: you build, edit and read the route directly on the chart.

Interaction

Action	Result
Drag	Pan
Scroll / pinch	Zoom
Click	Select a waypoint, leg, note or overlay item — or start a route on a first run
Drag a waypoint	Move it; the legs follow
Drag a leg's midpoint	Split the leg
Drag a label or kite	Reposition it; ↻ Reset marker position in the inspector undoes it
Bearing dial	Rotate the map — see Bearing dial

Multi-touch is guarded: a two-finger gesture will not be mistaken for a tap. On a touch screen a press only becomes a drag past a few pixels of travel, so a fingertip that never lands quite still still reads as a tap and leaves the waypoint where it is.

Nothing opens the inspector until you let go. A press cannot be told from a drag until the release, so pressing a waypoint, note, kite or leg line selects it and draws — and the panel waits. Let go without moving and it opens; drag, and a closed panel stays closed. A panel that was already open before you grabbed something stays open and refreshes onto the new selection. Every draggable follows this rule, on mouse and on touch alike.

A crosshair marks the centre on touch devices — phones and tablets, where there is no mouse pointer for the coordinate readout to follow. The readout then reports the crosshair. Its size, thickness, colour and opacity are tunable (crosshair*).

In add mode, kites are never grabbed. A tap always places a waypoint, even when it lands on a leg kite or a cumulative-time kite — the same exemption VOR, airfield and nav-waypoint markers already have there. Kite labels are chart decoration, and a kite's default position is not bounded by its own leg, so one can sit over a point you are about to add. Leave add mode to drag a kite.

A kite that is not drawn is never hit-testable either. That includes a leg flown inside the departure field's CTR: it is flown on the field's own procedure rather than the route's stopwatch, so it draws no cumulative kite and hides its leg kite by default — with no flag set on the leg.

The control column (bottom right)

Stacked above the zoom buttons. The in-flight buttons are round dark buttons with white line icons, one family; a button that is on fills with colour — blue = on, green = sharing (a green ring while connecting), amber = the route is locked or the chart turned by hand.

The first four appear only while ⏺ Record or 📍 Location is on — they steer your own-ship, and without one on the map there is nothing for them to steer. (A connected simulator drives the own-ship symbol but does not raise them; turn on Location for that.)

Control	What it does
Voice alerts (while recording / showing location)	A speaker: sound waves when the in-flight alerts are spoken (blue), a crossed speaker when they are silent. A toast says which way it went. Remembered on the device (navaid.voiceAlerts).
Orientation compass (while recording / showing location)	A needle pointing at something real on the screen: your track while the chart is north-up, north itself while the chart is turned to your track. The track is written under it (075°) whenever a fix is driving the map, and the needle is redrawn on every fix. Tapping switches north up ↔ heading up (blue); a third state (amber) says the map is turned by hand, and tapping straightens it. Remembered on the device (navaid.headingUp).
Follow (while recording / showing location)	A target — a ring with four ticks — because that is what it does: hold the map on one point. Blue with a filled centre while it is following, dark with a hollow centre while the map is yours to move. Turning it off says Not following — pan freely. On by default; remembered per device (navaid.gpsFollow).
Follow me (while recording / showing location)	A dot with radio waves: the same action as Follow me in the toolbar (Follow me). Green while your position is reaching the link, a green ring while it connects.
Measure (always shown)	A ruler, from the aircraft. It works while a position is showing (Location, recording or the simulator); otherwise it is dimmed, and a tap says Measure works from your position: turn on Location (while planning, two waypoints give the distance). Pressed (blue), a tap on the map measures to that point: the dashed line runs from the aircraft and follows it, and the label gives the distance, the magnetic bearing and the time at the current ground speed: 16 NM · 131° / 9 min at 110 kt (no time below 20 kt). The label sits at the middle of the part of the line in view, above the chart's symbols and clear of the map buttons, the top strip and the bottom bar. A tap snaps to published points; a drag still pans; pressing another map button is never taken as a point; nothing is added to the route and the edit lock does not apply. Measure and Add / Note exclude each other. Clear map removes the measurement. It survives a reload; if the position stops, the line goes and comes back with it. While measuring the pointer is a crosshair. Press the ruler again to clear. Colours: measureLineColor, measureDotFill, measureLabelBg, measureLabelText.
Edit lock (always)	A padlock: shut (amber) = nothing on the route moves, open = points and labels can be dragged. It locks on its own while a position is showing; one tap unlocks for this flight only. Remembered on the device (navaid.editLocked).
💬 Assistant	The AI assistant launcher — off on the live site, see that page.
↻ Bearing dial	Rotate the map by hand — see Bearing dial.

Panning or zooming by hand while following suspends it for a few seconds (followResumeMs) so a fix does not snatch the view back mid-look, then following resumes on its own. Tapping a control in this column is not a pan and does not suspend anything.

What following does to the zoom

Two different moments, on purpose:

• The first fix — the moment Location or Record finds you — and turning follow on both re-frame the view: the zoom is clamped into a band you can fly with. The band depends on where the aeroplane is — 12–15 inside a control zone, 10–14 everywhere else — because in a CTR the questions are close-in ones (which reporting point, which runway, where the traffic is) and a 40-mile view answers none of them. It is a clamp, not a setting: a zoom already inside the band is a deliberate choice about how much chart to see, and is left alone. Tunable as followZoomFloor / followZoomCeiling and followZoomCtrFloor / followZoomCtrCeiling — see Auto zoom for every automatic zoom in the app and the keys behind them.
• Following resuming after the grace period does not touch the zoom at all. It re-centres at whatever zoom is on screen — otherwise a pilot who zoomed in deliberately would be pulled back out a second after they stopped panning, once per fix.

Whether you are in a CTR is answered from the airspace geometry, not from the airspace layer being switched on: where the aeroplane is does not depend on what you have chosen to draw.

Base layers

CVFR (default), Navigation, Low Alt, Satellite and OpenStreetMap — plus Helicopters, which the live site does not currently offer (why) — see Map Layers for sources, native zoom and export quality. The aviation charts cover Israel; Satellite and OSM are worldwide.

Switching the base chart also swaps the data behind the overlays (nav waypoints, frequency changes, leg altitudes) to that chart's set. On Satellite / OSM / Navigation you can choose which set to use with Nav waypoints from.

Overlays

Toggled in Map: nav waypoints, airfields, VOR stations, waypoint names, cumulative time, drift lines, frequency changes, leg distance, highlight speed/altitude changes, keep kites inside the leg, mandatory reporting points, snap-to-nearest. Weather, NOTAMs and Terrain vs altitude live in Extra layers.

Chart symbols follow the zoom. Airfields, reporting points, VOR stations and frequency-change callouts can shrink as you zoom out (symbolScaleSmallest, between symbolScaleMinZoom and symbolScaleFullZoom), and each kind can be hidden below a zoom of its own (airfieldMinZoom, navWpMinZoom, vorMinZoom, commChangeMinZoom). What is drawn is what can be tapped: a smaller symbol has a smaller tap area, and a hidden one cannot be tapped. The defaults keep every symbol full size at every zoom; set them in the gist or the Tuning Panel.

How the route is drawn

• Solid line between waypoints, with direction arrows.
• Waypoint discs in pale yellow (waypointFillColor), the selected one highlighted in amber (selectedColor).
• Dashed line for the return path, when shown (off by default, see Toolbar).
• Kites for heading/time/altitude and cumulative time.

Colours, sizes and opacities are adjustable — the Display menu for the common ones, the Tuning Panel for the rest.

The clock on the map

A slider across the bottom of the chart (the top, on a phone), from now to +24 h (mapClockHoursAhead). It is the one clock: every layer that depends on time answers to it — NOTAM and AIRMET, the wind effect, the wind-field grid, the airfield wind barbs, and the density altitude in an open airfield panel. The readout names the hour it has selected, and Now returns to live.

Forward only. There is no arguing with what the weather did yesterday; the question a pilot scrubs for is what it will be doing when they get there.

It points at a fixed instant, not a rolling offset: choosing +3h at 12:00Z means 15:00Z, so as the real clock advances the slider walks itself back — +3h, +2h, … — and snaps to live when now catches up. The hour it names moves on its own at live, too, so a chart left open across the top of the hour does not go on naming the hour it was opened in.

The weather charts cannot follow an hourly clock: they publish at 00/03/06/12/18Z. Scrubbing snaps them to the newest sheet issued at or before the chosen hour and says which one, rather than leaving two layers quietly disagreeing about what "+3h" means.

With nothing time-dependent on screen the control goes quiet rather than disappearing — dim, never hidden. An open airfield panel counts, because its density altitude answers to this clock.

A phone is the exception: there the strip lies across the chart itself, so an idle clock is not dim furniture but a bar over the map, and it is taken away instead (hideIdleMapClockOnPhone, on by default) — see Phone layout. A live position puts it away on any screen (hideMapClockWhileLive): the hour being flown is now.

On a phone the inspector is a bottom sheet that covers the map's copy, so the panel carries its own face of the same clock at the top; scrubbing either moves both. It appears only when there is something for a clock to move — a timed layer, or a density altitude in the panel. A waypoint, a note or an ADS-B aircraft has nothing that answers to time, and a slider there would offer to change something you cannot see.

featureMapClock withdraws it.

Around the edges

• Route summary — legs, distance, ETE and fuel, in the legend card.
• Legend — what the symbols mean; drag it anywhere.
• Coordinate readout and zoom readout, bottom right — clear of the zoom buttons on a phone. The zoom readout is two lines (zoom over scale, z10 / 0.25×) in a box the round buttons' width, so the column keeps one edge.
• Messages (toasts) come in front: while one shows, the start-a-route hint and the coordinate readouts under it step back, and return when it goes.
• Zulu clock, top right.
• Search panel — a permanent panel on a desktop (left in English, right in Hebrew), a summoned overlay on a phone.

Every one of those panels is draggable, and each remembers its place per language, because the RTL and LTR layouts mirror.

See also

• Map Layers · Bearing dial · Route and Legs · Extra Layers