Fly2lunch

Jim K

Jim K

Final Approach
PoA Supporter
Joined
Mar 31, 2019
Messages
5,970
Location
CMI
Display Name
Display name:
Richard Digits
I get this every time I try to access the site:

Screenshot_20220509-080505_Chrome.jpg

Does this mean the site is down, or is the problem on my end? I can still access pages deeper in the site from my history, but they may be cached. It always felt slightly abandoned.. maybe the hosting didn't get paid?

I loved the concept and functionality of this website and was always disappointed more people didn't use & update it. Are they any alternatives to find restaurants on airport or very close?
 
Same here, in terms of "access denied".
 
Seems to be down.
 
Rgbeard said:
If fly2lunch comes back from lunch, it really needs to be maintained. Sooo many restaurants closed and the information is out of date.
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I always try to make edits such as removing all the operating hours when there's one that's closed. I've emailed the admin, but it seems to be a black hole and nothing gets taken down. It's a starting point; you still have to search out the actual website or Facebook page to make sure the place still exists, but I'm not aware of any other searchable resource to help find on field restaurants.
 
Jim K said:
I always try to make edits such as removing all the operating hours when there's one that's closed. I've emailed the admin, but it seems to be a black hole and nothing gets taken down. It's a starting point; you still have to search out the actual website or Facebook page to make sure the place still exists, but I'm not aware of any other searchable resource to help find on field restaurants.
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It'd be nice if the site could be re-done as a wiki. That way it might be a little more self-sustaining.
 
It's back!
 
Site worked for me too, just now (Sunday, May 15, 2022).
 
Jim K said:
...I loved the concept and functionality of this website and was always disappointed more people didn't use & update it. Are they any alternatives...
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I'm not familiar w/ the site. Please describe what it did and how it was useful. I'm itching for a new project.
 
Mahneuvers said:
I'm not familiar w/ the site. Please describe what it did and how it was useful. I'm itching for a new project.
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Punch in an airport code, find places to eat within a specified range.
 
Mahneuvers said:
I'm not familiar w/ the site. Please describe what it did and how it was useful. I'm itching for a new project.
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It's back up. I'd encourage you to check it out.
asicer said:
Yes, but are they taking edits? I'm seeing a few places that are long gone.
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I doubt it. Last news post was July '21, although it was about deleting restaurants. I've been thinking I should try to reach out to the owners to see if I could help.
 
Jim K said:
...It's back up. I'd encourage you to check it out...
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Thanks. That's a pretty useful site but, of course, the utility declines w/ the amount of old/bad data you must wade through. Hopefully it gets a second wind coming out of the pandemic.

Google charges for those maps with pins over a certain threshold. Considering it's a free site, I'm curious if it was a losing money endeavor.
 
Mahneuvers said:
Thanks. That's a pretty useful site but, of course, the utility declines w/ the amount of old/bad data you must wade through. Hopefully it gets a second wind coming out of the pandemic.

Google charges for those maps with pins over a certain threshold. Considering it's a free site, I'm curious if it was a losing money endeavor.
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I think the site was stale looong before covid.
 
eman1200 said:
I think the site was stale looong before covid.
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That's possibly b/c ~90% of the data is readily available elsewhere. I have no idea the site's original mission or if/how it evolved over time. But obviously, the more information you present, the more there is to maintain and become stale. It seems all the airport info, weather etc. is, IMO, overkill. Nowadays, getting restaurant reviews, hours, directions, phone numbers, menus etc. is all super easy. The gap is the aviation specific information i.e. is the restaurant walk-able, how's ramp space, courtesy cars, Uber availability etc.
 
Mahneuvers said:
That's possibly b/c ~90% of the data is readily available elsewhere. I have no idea the site's original mission or if/how it evolved over time. But obviously, the more information you present, the more there is to maintain and become stale. It seems all the airport info, weather etc. is, IMO, overkill. Nowadays, getting restaurant reviews, hours, directions, phone numbers, menus etc. is all super easy. The gap is the aviation specific information i.e. is the restaurant walk-able, how's ramp space, courtesy cars, Uber availability etc.
Click to expand...
I've always said that it'd be nice if PoA had a wiki.
 
Mahneuvers said:
That's possibly b/c ~90% of the data is readily available elsewhere. I have no idea the site's original mission or if/how it evolved over time. But obviously, the more information you present, the more there is to maintain and become stale. It seems all the airport info, weather etc. is, IMO, overkill. Nowadays, getting restaurant reviews, hours, directions, phone numbers, menus etc. is all super easy. The gap is the aviation specific information i.e. is the restaurant walk-able, how's ramp space, courtesy cars, Uber availability etc.
Click to expand...
I typically look up airports in google and see what restaurants are nearby. Probably the best solution would be to have a repository link up to an EFB like ForeFlight.
 
eman1200 said:
Punch in an airport code, find places to eat within a specified range.
Click to expand...
Better: Punch in a route and see places to eat along the route. Great for trying to plan a lunch stop on a long trip. Of course, I always end up landing wherever has the cheapest gas and taking the courtesy car to the nearest McDonalds.
 
Pilots don’t even update foreflight info, I have a feeling this will get updated for a few months and then go back to stagnant updates.
 
AOPA has the same stale restaurant info on their airport pages, it looks like they siphoned off of fly2lunch.
 
asicer said:
I've always said that it'd be nice if PoA had a wiki.
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When I get time, I'll see if I can write a program to log in to POA. They might have protections in place. I wouldn't do this to access site services but only to identify valid POA UID/PWD combinations. If successful, I could then host something simple from my home computer available to POA members.
 
Joe_B1 said:
AOPA has the same stale restaurant info on their airport pages, it looks like they siphoned off of fly2lunch.
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Most likely the other way 'round. AOPA's airport info is easy to data mine (actually it's fairly well designed believe it or not).
 
I wrote a program which can tell if a UID/PWD combination is valid on POA. I'll now move on to setting up a wiki server. I'm learning a lot so even if this goes nowhere it's been worth the time.
 
I've spent like 3 more days on this now. I've learned a lot...it's all good. I'm now familiar with jsoup. That was interesting. I'm now more familiar with Spring Boot, MySql and Tomcat. Everything new is about two hour activity. I'm hoping the pace accelerates!
 
Mahneuvers said:
I've spent like 3 more days on this now. I've learned a lot...it's all good. I'm now familiar with jsoup. That was interesting. I'm now more familiar with Spring Boot, MySql and Tomcat. Everything new is about two hour activity. I'm hoping the pace accelerates!
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I don't know what any of that means, but I'm all for people learning new stuff!
 
I have a lot working. Where I'm stuck now is finding the restaurants (really airports w/ restaurants close by) w/in a certain distance of a route. MySQL provides some good spatial functions which I used to find airports w/in a certain distance of other airports. MySQL also provides functions for finding the minimum distance between a point and a line (which is really just many points), but, what it's doing behind the scenes is finding the closes point describing the line to the other point. This doesn't help much for long legs. I'm thinking I when people enter a route, I need to interpolate points in between route legs over a certain distance...unless someone has a better idea. I've found some serious math equations to compute this but I'm hoping to avoid that.
 
Mahneuvers said:
I have a lot working. Where I'm stuck now is finding the restaurants (really airports w/ restaurants close by) w/in a certain distance of a route. MySQL provides some good spatial functions which I used to find airports w/in a certain distance of other airports. MySQL also provides functions for finding the minimum distance between a point and a line (which is really just many points), but, what it's doing behind the scenes is finding the closes point describing the line to the other point. This doesn't help much for long legs. I'm thinking I when people enter a route, I need to interpolate points in between route legs over a certain distance...unless someone has a better idea. I've found some serious math equations to compute this but I'm hoping to avoid that.
Click to expand...

jim's gotta be pretty darn hungry by now.......
 
Mahneuvers said:
I have a lot working. Where I'm stuck now is finding the restaurants (really airports w/ restaurants close by) w/in a certain distance of a route. MySQL provides some good spatial functions which I used to find airports w/in a certain distance of other airports. MySQL also provides functions for finding the minimum distance between a point and a line (which is really just many points), but, what it's doing behind the scenes is finding the closes point describing the line to the other point. This doesn't help much for long legs. I'm thinking I when people enter a route, I need to interpolate points in between route legs over a certain distance...unless someone has a better idea. I've found some serious math equations to compute this but I'm hoping to avoid that.
Click to expand...

I thought MySQL was a database, what’s it doing with spatial functionality?
There’s a database with USA hotels, restaurants, etc available somewhere which includes GPS coordinates.
I think you be better off just having user provide airports as possible stops, then checking all airports within a certain radius and going from there.
 
MooneyDriver78 said:
I thought MySQL was a database, what’s it doing with spatial functionality?
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Lot's of use cases these days have to do w/ where you are and what's around you. As a result, databases themselves now provide convenience functions so programmers don't have to recreate the wheel. The math/formulas are pretty nasty.

MooneyDriver78 said:
There’s a database with USA hotels, restaurants, etc available somewhere which includes GPS coordinates.
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Yep. I've loaded a table with every airport in the US (lat, lon, city, state, county, airport code). My plan is not to pre-load restaurants. Users will be able to add restaurants worth stopping at w/ a few pieces of information (related airport, restaurant proximity to airport and a Google Maps link). Users will then be able add pilot-specific commentary by restaurant. Users should access the Google Maps link for everything else (map, pictures, directions, menu, phone number, hours etc.).

MooneyDriver78 said:
I think you be better off just having user provide airports as possible stops, then checking all airports within a certain radius and going from there.
Click to expand...
That's a good idea. I have searching around the radius of one airport working and extending that to a list of airports wouldn't difficult. I'll fallback to that if my route interpolation idea proves untenable. It seems a useful feature to return the restaurants w/in a certain distance of a route as there might be some hidden gems near airports users might not ever think to stop at.
 
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Mahneuvers said:
… Users will then be able add pilot-specific commentary by restaurant. Users should access the Google Maps link for everything else (map, pictures, directions, menu, phone number, hours etc.)…
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Why not just fetch the commercial (google/yelp/expedia/travelocity/4square) reviews? Seems like reinventing the wheel for the users.

As for route functionality, on an XC, I plan my stops on fuel price and food. If I put in a direct route, show me airports with the cheapest gas (airnav) and best food (google/yelp/etc.). Allow me to weight the results toward cheaper gas or better food, or just give a simple $ scale for gas and a ️rating for food. Let me set the $ and ️ criteria and return all the stops along my route that meet those criteria.

I know, what’s simple is hard.
 
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