What every feature does

108 tracked aerodromes — every South African large/medium airport plus the neighboring-country fields, from OurAirports' public dataset. The search box filters by ICAO, IATA, name, or city as you type.

The six status chips at the top summarize everything else on this page for the selected airport at a glance: current weather category, whether a georeferenced chart overlay exists for it, and the connection status of NOTAMs, SIGMETs, aviation warnings, and recent flight history.

Current conditions is the airport's latest real METAR, decoded — wind, visibility, temperature/dewpoint, QNH — plus the raw report text underneath. Source: the free FAA aviationweather.gov API, which carries global coverage including South African stations.

TAF trend samples the airport's official forecast every 3 hours across its validity window (usually ~24-30h) and draws it as wind-speed/gust bars with direction arrows and a flight-category strip underneath — this is the forecast a pilot would actually brief off.

METAR trend (last 24h) is different: it's actual past observations, not a forecast, same visual style as the TAF trend but every column really happened — including a QNH row with a rising/falling trend arrow, useful for watching pressure develop.

7 days ahead at 3-hourly steps — wind/gust, direction, temperature, rain, and cloud cover. Source: Open-Meteo, a free raw GFS/ICON weather-model feed, the same category of source a site like windguru.cz runs on.

This is explicitly not an official aviation forecast. A TAF only covers about a day ahead because that's as far as an aviation forecaster is willing to commit; this panel exists for the days beyond that, at model-forecast confidence, not TAF confidence. Use the TAF trend above for anything you'd actually brief off.

Active SIGMETs — real hazard polygons (severe turbulence, icing, volcanic ash, etc.) from aviationweather.gov's global feed — are matched to the selected airport by an actual point-in-polygon test against each hazard's published coordinates, not just a region guess. Shown as a red card when one genuinely covers the airport.

Aviation warnings (SAWS-style) and NOTAMs are honestly marked “not connected” — SAWS's own aviation product and ATNS's NOTAM feed (File2Fly) are both real but gated behind accounts this app doesn't have. Each card explains the actual next step (who to contact, what to register for) instead of showing fabricated data.

Computed live from the current METAR plus real runway geometry and field elevation (OurAirports' public runway/airport datasets, same licensing as the airport list).

Density altitude uses the standard FAA approximation — pressure altitude from field elevation and QNH, then 120ft of density-altitude shift per degree C the actual temperature deviates from the ISA-standard temperature at that pressure altitude.

Runway wind components shows headwind/crosswind (and gust crosswind) for both ends of every runway, best-aligned end highlighted. Runway heading is deliberately derived from the runway's own designator number (e.g. “09” = 090°) rather than true heading, because METAR/TAF wind direction is reported in magnetic — comparing against true heading would be off by South Africa's real magnetic declination, enough to pick the wrong runway.

Appears only when the selected airport is reporting below VFR. Lists tracked airports within 250nm currently showing a better flight category, sorted by distance, with bearing.

This is proximity + current weather only — not a real dispatcher-grade alternate-minima calculation. Fuel, aircraft performance, and approach minima aren't factored in.

Real flight history — genuine callsigns and routes — from OpenSky Network's authenticated API. Unlike the live traffic map layer, this endpoint carries actual origin/destination per flight.

Two honest limitations, found by testing rather than assumed: it's recent history, not a live board (the matching pipeline needs a 24-48h-old window to return full data), and coverage is uneven — busier fields like O.R. Tambo have rich data, several smaller tracked fields return nothing even in a working window.

Pick any two tracked aerodromes for real great-circle distance (nm and km), true bearing, and an ETE at whatever cruise speed you set (kt and km/h) — drawn as an actual great-circle line via spherical interpolation, not a straight lon/lat line, over whichever airspace/route layers are already switched on.

Real SACAA aerodrome charts (Cape Town/FACT, Durban/FALE, Lanseria/FALA) overlaid on the map at their true geographic position — georeferenced by locating each chart's own printed graticule labels and fitting the frame to them, then cross-checked against the runway threshold coordinates published in the same chart. Each chart only covers a few km around its airport, so toggling one on flies the map straight to it.

ATS routes are South Africa's real published upper/lower airways — route designators, ordered waypoints, exact coordinates — parsed directly from SACAA's own AIP text (ENR 3.2/3.3), not traced off a chart image.

Prohibited/restricted/danger areas are the 105 real areas published in the same AIP (ENR 5.1) — circles, arcs, and polygons, parsed from the exact published coordinates. These are the published boundaries only; there's no real-time activation-schedule data available (that's NOTAM-gated, the same gap as the NOTAM card), so a shown area means “published,” not necessarily “active right now.”

Terrain is real SRTM-derived elevation (AWS's free Terrarium tiles) as hillshade relief. With it on, click anywhere on the map for the actual elevation at that point (decoded live from the same tile data).

Drone no-fly buffers draws a real 10km circle around every tracked aerodrome — SACAA CAR 101's published buffer within which drone approval is required for any operation. The elevation-click readout also shows a 150ft AGL private- ops altitude ceiling (SACAA's own published default — not the commonly-cited 120m/400ft figure, which several third-party summaries get wrong for South Africa; licensed operators under their own Operating Certificate may have a different authorized limit).

Recolors the airport markers themselves by live flight category (green/blue/magenta/ red) instead of adding separate markers — one bulk METAR request across all 108 airports, same decoding logic as the current-conditions card.

Real current aircraft positions from OpenSky Network's public feed — labeled “community ADS-B,” not an ATC feed, since coverage depends on volunteer ground receivers rather than a guaranteed radar network.

Click any airport and choose “Watch traffic here,” or pick one from the dropdown, to filter to aircraft within 75km — a sortable list (nearest/highest) appears alongside the map. This is proximity, not a confirmed to/from match; real per-flight origin/destination is the dashboard's arrivals/ departures card instead, a day delayed rather than live.

One table of all 108 tracked airports' current flight category, wind, visibility, and report age — a watch-the-whole-region view instead of picking one airport at a time, sorted worst-category-first by default. Click any column header to re-sort, or filter by ICAO/name/city. Same METAR data as the rest of the app, not a separate feed.

A live status page (/health) tracking real success/failure for every external data source this app depends on — METAR/TAF/SIGMET, OpenSky, Open-Meteo — since the server last restarted. Mostly a diagnostic tool, not a pilot-facing feature.