Flight Advisor

Flight

Advisor

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Enhancing safety outside controlled airspace

A safety management tool for increasing situational awareness before flight

Pilots flying at low level outside of controlled airspace operate in a complex environment and face multiple hazards.

Helicopter logging operations with suspended cables, airborne crop spraying for agriculture, commercial and recreational drone operations, military training flights, and uncharted obstacles including towers, wind turbines, and wires strung across valleys – all mix in an environment that lies beyond the boundaries of Air Traffic Control.

Enhancing Safety, Enhancing Integration

Flight Advisor is an online tool aimed at helping reduce the risk of mid-air collisions and/or collisions with hazards in the low level environment. It provides pilots with an awareness of what hazards they may need to be aware of when operating at low level. These hazards can be fixed obstacles, UAV's or other manned aircraft that have indicated their intentions to operate in the same vicinity at the same time.

Conceived by the Royal New Zealand Air Force and developed in collaboration with the national Aeronautical Information Service (Aeropath), Flight Advisor is used by the military and is open to all civilian operators across New Zealand.

Advisories

Let others know where you are planning to fly

Flight Advisor enables pilots to draw their planned area of operations or intended flight path for low level flights – typically below 3000 ft AMSL or 1000 ft AGL (whichever is higher) and outside of controlled airspace. These are depicted on a dynamic map accessible via a web browser on a computer, tablet or smartphone.

Other users of Flight Advisor can immediately see where flights may overlap and are therefore aware of who else might be operating in their area.

Graphically depict where you intend to operate so all other users can see and de-conflict with your operation.

Use this feature to create and view advisories so you can enhance your situational awareness before flight.

Should the worst happen, this advisory will become invaluable information for any rescue operation.

The map gives the ability to look 48 hours into the future to see what flights pilots may have lodged in advance.

Affected users can receive an email notification if a new flight is planned that overlaps with previously planned flights.

Obstacles

Crowdsourcing terrestrial hazard information

Easily report any uncharted hazards (wires, towers, antennas etc) that you encounter and are not currently promulgated on charts.

Obstacles below a certain height outside of controlled airspace might not meet the historical requirements for notification and publication (on charts). New hazards affecting low level operations outside of controlled airspace are not always reported by the those erecting the hazard. These hazards are a source of many incidents; unknown suspended cables and wires can be devastating to helicopters in particular.

To make reporting easier, Flight Advisor enables users to drop a geolocation pin on the web map, and with a few simple clicks, the map is immediately updated with the hazard so all pilots know about it; it is marked as 'user-reported' until it can be verified by Aeropath.

Flight Advisor automatically alerts the Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) team at Aeropath to investigate and verify the user-reported hazard. When verification is complete, the new hazard is added to the national register managed by AIM and will be included on published aeronautical charts going forward.

The most comprehensive obstacle dataset in NZ, crowdsourced from operators across the country and vetted by Aeropath (NZ AIS Part 175) on behalf of the CAA.

See all known obstacles in the areas you intend to operate, both verified and pilot reported.

You can mark hazards too – in less than a minute you might just save someone else’s life!

Notifications

Subscribe to a notification area

Users can draw an area that they would like to receive alert notifications for.

An automatic advisory email and/or SMS message will be sent to the user any time someone submits a Flight Advisory within their subscription area.

Commitment to safety

Improving your situational awareness

Flight Advisor vastly improves situational awareness for operators planning low level flights outside of controlled airspace, an environment where users traditionally do not have access to rich information.

This environment is also crowded with other hazards to air navigation, many of which do not typically appear on national data sets of aviation obstacles, and are not as closely controlled as obstacles in the vicinity of an aerodrome. Providing a simple mechanism to report (crowdsource) and instantly share these hazards with other users improves the hazard data set and enhances situational awareness in real time.

Flight Advisor is a useful tool to get the right information to all users (and systems) at the right time to contribute to a common operating picture.

Flight Advisor is available to all in the aviation industry, and is typically used by the NZDF, agricultural, forestry, EMS and drone communities that are regularly engaged in low level aerial activities that may overlap with each other.

FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

Operated by the

Royal New Zealand Air Force

Aeropath

Contact:

flightadvisor@nzdf.mil.nz

Aeropath Ltd.

Terms and Conditions

Let others know where you are planning to fly

Crowdsourcing terrestrial hazard information

Subscribe to a notification area

Improving your situational awareness

What is Flight Advisor?

Who can register to use Flight Advisor?

How do I register for a login?

Do people outside the NZDF have to pay to use Flight Advisor?

What devices and browsers support Flight Advisor?

Thanks for the free maps, what happens if I just use them and do nothing else?

How up to date are the maps?

Why can I only submit an Advisory up to 48 hours ahead?

Is every Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) visible on Flight Advisor?

Do I have to provide my aircraft model or callsign in an Advisory?

Do I still have to submit a VFR Flight Plan if I use Flight Advisor?

What airspace is displayed within Flight Advisor?

How do reported obstacles end up on Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) overlays?

I already plot my routes in other EFB systems. Can those automatically generate a Flight Advisory?

Can I integrate my system with Flight Advisor?

Is my Notification Phone Number displayed in the Advisory information?

Not all NOTAMs appear within Flight Advisor, why not?

Who is Aeropath?

After flight do I need to cancel my Flight Advisory like a Flight Plan?

If there is a collision and both parties were using Flight Advisor, is the NZDF liable?

What happens if someone starts using Flight Advisor maliciously?

How secure is Flight Advisor?

Is Flight Advisor certified?

Flight Advisor doesn't seem to be working, who can I contact?