| 11 October 2009
Who?
A small home grown business set up to allow all aviators to access important weather information, for example when their usual source of this information is not available. The webmaster and owner, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , is currently a serving member of the Royal Air Force in the United Kingdom, with 19 years and counting service, he is a trained specialist in communications and has had 18 months training as aircrew on rotary wing with a higher national cetificate in avaition studies.
Why?
As a member of the Royal Air Force and while training for rearcrew on helicopters the webmaster found on the odd occasion, required weather information was not available, either due to location or failure of technical systems, so after doin some research, other information sources were costly and not a feasible replacement for normal information sources. The online system allows free access to this information, with the creation of an Android based program for use on mobiles gives you another free method of accessing this information. However there are occasions when the Internet is not accessible, and therefore we created the SMS request system using the SMS shortcode 60300.
How?
We do not want to give the game away as to our system and sources of information, instead we will introduce the technologies and services used to bring the service and site to both members and non-members. The site itself is created using the Joomla Content Management System, this flexible system allows easy manipulation of content, the site is provided by a template purchased from YooTheme, the beauty of Joomla is ability to change the look of the entire site, without the need for altering every piece of content. Your information is securly stored in our MySQL database which we connect to using PHP, a stable and very useful scripting language that is used around the world by millions of webpages, including the huge social network site Facebook for example. The SMS service along woth our hosting service is provided by Interneers, a company set up years ago to host sites for friends and family of the webmaster, during the aircrew training, the webmaster decided to create TAFs & METARs, using the existiing web server he all ready had available, the SMS messaging was acquired to provide TAFs & METARs the SMS request facility, Interneers however also offers this service to anyone who feels communication using a shortcode and a keyword will benefit there business.