Enabling Flight Departments to View Critical Preflight Weather
Pilots and aircraft dispatchers rely on weather information to make crucial decisions regarding flight planning, safety, and fuel management. Before flight, pilots use preflight weather to plan the flight route, and ultimately decide whether the flight is safe to conduct. While in-flight, real-time weather information enables pilots to navigate around turbulence, storms, and icing.
Flight departments obtain route-specific weather information from electronic flight bags (EFBs) and industry-specific weather services. Universal Weather & Aviation, a leading provider of trip support services for business aviation operators, engaged Perituza to build a web-based application which visualizes location-based weather data.
A Real-Time Aviation Weather Interface for Corporate Flight Departments
Universal’s web-based weather information system provides pilots and aircraft dispatchers with a platform to view and customize preflight weather maps. The maps can be added to flight plan packages in Universal’s self-service flight planning software.
The weather layers, rendered using feeds from both government and private sources, include:
- 5METARs (Meteorological Aerodrome Reports)
- 5TAFs (Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts)
- 5PIREPs (Pilot Reports)
- 5Winds Aloft
- 5AIRMETs (Airmen’s Meteorological Information)
- 5SIGMETs (Significant Meteorological Information)
- 5NOTAMs (Notices to Airmen)
- 5Visibility and cloud cover
A Highly Scalable Platform Processing Millions of Records Each Day
Over the course of two (2) years and four (4) months, Perituza delivered the aviation weather application in three phases:
Phase I - The processing of weather-related data from third-party sources
Building of SSIS packages which downloaded data files from various sources via HTTP and FTP
Decoding, extraction, and storage of data elements in Microsoft SQL Server
SSIS packages scheduled to run on various time intervals
Phase II – Analysis and modeling of weather data
Data models built using SQL Server spatial queries
Validation of models by Universal’s Meteorology and Flight Planning department
Phase III – Development of a client-facing interface featuring weather layers
Development of a self-service web portal for use by pilots and dispatchers
Overlaying of weather-related data on Google Maps for location-based visualization
A Dedicated Full-Time Development Team
Perituza provided Universal with seven (7) senior developers for the duration of the project.
Having worked with developers from Perituza for nearly two years on different software development projects, I definitely can give my endorsement for the quality of work and level of support that Perituza has provided throughout the duration of the projects. For our projects, Perituza has been a great source of expert knowledge and dedicated talent that has enabled us to develop highly specialized software products for our customers.
Ken Penny
Senior Product Manager
Universal Weather and Aviation, Inc.
The Result
The project was implemented successfully, and the software is now used by the client’s global customers in planning flights across the world. The system processes approximately 2.5 million data records every six (6) hours.
Key Technologies & Third-Party Integrations
