Embedding Examples

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The ACARS system has pretty neat possibilities to liven up your web site with nice, live imagery "from the flight deck". Many of these images can be linked uniquely to your plane; others are for a complete group of planes.

In most cases, you can use a HTML <iframe> tag to include the image in your web site. Most images have parameters so you can tune them to what you want.

Please be considerate to the web server: do not embed stuff that you know will be downloaded a million times per hour. But for most normal applications, my web server will be powerful enough and care has been taken that the intensive things are cached.

Current position of one plane

If a plane reports positions using the ADS-C system, its position can be shown on a live globe that shows the actual lighting of the Earth by the Sun as well.

To show this on your web site:

<iframe width="620" height="620" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://www.hoppie.nl/acars/system/wfplot.html"></iframe>

To manipulate the output of the actual wfplot.html page, you can give it some parameters:

wfplot.html?id=QFA25&size=medium&width=350&height=280

The id parameter selects a specific call sign.
The size parameter selects a size. It can be one of "large", "medium", or "small". When you leave it out, a 620x620 full globe view comes out. The others select a 350x280 rectangular view in several zoom levels.
width and height override the 350 and 280 rectangular size parameters. The full globe cannot be resized.

Overview of all planes in the system

A nice feature is this Google Maps-based general overview. Normally it shows all planes that are reporting positions by ADS-C and zooms in as close as possible to still catch them all. If there happens to be just one plane, the zoom depends on that plane's altitude. With no planes, you get just the world map.

To show this on your web site:

<iframe width="600" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://www.hoppie.nl/acars/system/wfmap.html"></iframe>

To manipulate the output of the actual wfmap.html page, you can give it extra parameters:

wfmap.html?w=1024&h=768&nt=1&id=BAW744&solo=1

This would produce an image output of 1024 x 768 pixels (w*h) and with no title (nt) text, of just the BAW744 aircraft (if it is present). You can fill in any values you want. Default for both size parameters is 600 pixels. If you leave out solo=1 then other planes are also shown but the given ID is centered and its altitude determines the zoom level.

Another parameter that should not be used together with id and/or solo is company=BAW. This filters for just the BAW* callsigns, and is useful to generate company-specific maps.

In all cases, the page asks the browser to refresh itself every five minutes. This cannot be changed.

WorldFlight Progress Board

If you participate in WorldFlight, and your plane reports the standard OOOI Progress Messages, you can generate a current airport-style progress/status overview. Notice that this board is triggered only by progress messages that have the exact ICAO airport identifier pairs of a leg in the current WorldFlight route. The board will update as you make progress.

<iframe width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://www.hoppie.nl/acars/system/wfplan.html?id=QFA25"></iframe>

Next to the id parameter, you can include style=none which will suppress the CSS code so you can add your own. text=0 will suppress the header and footer text if you provide your own. The page refreshes itself every 60 seconds.

WorldFlight Air Show

Even more specific for WorldFlight is the "Air Show" which resembles what is available aboard larger passenger aircraft. This Air Show can be further specialised for WorldFlight participants by including a random photo list, but you have little control over it except for the call sign.

<iframe width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://www.hoppie.nl/acars/system/wfshow.html?id=QFA25"></iframe>

For more information, mail to hoppie@hoppie.nl