Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Merging flights

I've had a couple of requests over the years to be able to merge flights. E.g., if you fly out to lunch and then fly back, you might record that as two flights and then decide you want them to be one. (For that, "Pause/Play" in the apps actually works pretty well, but if you take a multi-day trip, no so much due to battery consumption).

This is inherently a potentially destructive operation: for example,some fields can't be merged, or at least not in an obvious way. A good example of this is the "Fuel remaining at landing" property - if you have this set for multiple flights, there's no way to resolve that. But it should capture most of the data in an "intelligent" way: adding values that can be added, concatenating the route/comment, and concatenating (to the degree possible) flight telemetry. (If the telemetry formats don't match, the resulting data will only have the common subset, so this too is destructive).

It's also a bit of a corner case of functionality, so I'm not integrating this into the core UI. Instead, I'm putting it into my "playpen" area. Stuff in the playpen is functional, but not as thoroughly tested and without the same fit-and-finish as the main parts of the site.

The tool is here if you want to try it out, but be aware: there IS NO UNDO, and all but one of the merged flights will be deleted (the earliest of the flights is preserved as the "target" of the merge). So it's not a bad idea to make sure you have a backup of any flights, images, and telemetry before you merge flights.

Note that if you simply want to merge telemetry files, there is a separate tool, also in the playpen, where you can do this. Since this is not dependent on your logbook, it is safe to use, you cannot lose data. The output is GPX, so any flight path should be preserved, but other data that is in your input will not be present in the output.

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