PropBlast

Perhaps I should change my Yet Another Web Site Aler (Yawsa) to Yet Another Aviation Navigation And Flight Planning Web Site. There seems to be so many of them these days. Nah, YAANAFPWS just doesn't roll of the tongue as nicely as Yawsa...

Well, NavMonster is another in this new breed of mashables that uses Google Maps and any number of other databases to give you a quick and dirty flight planning tool.

Choose a departure and arrival point (hopefully an airport) and it will map it out on Google Maps as well as provide you with links to airport information on all the airports in between the end points of your route of flight. Shows you distance, initial true course and ETE (defaults to 120 knots but you can change this value).

Tabs provide you with Weather, chart,fuel, food & lodging, FBOs and Airport Data along your route of flight. Unfotunately, it falls a bit short in some areas. You can't hover over an airport to see the TAFs or Metars as other do. It also doesn't display airspace, which at least where I live, is a non-starter in a flight planning tool. I think I'll stick with tools like RunwayFinder.com, FlightCentral.net, WeatherMeister and Weather.Aero and my trusty FliteStar of course.

I just noticed that SkyVector (a great charting resource) has now added Flight Planning. Right click on your departure airport and your destination airport (and I would assume any waypoints along the way and it will tell you the distance between them as well as the initial True course. And of course it still retains the hover-over for TAF and Metars that I've enjoyed for a while!

Does anyone else have any favorite online flight planning tools they'd like to offer up to the group?

The artwork on this site is so spectacular, I just had  to run it bigger than the usual thumbnail.

I stumbled across this site while following a link, from another link from ... well, you get the idea.

The samples of aviation-themed tattoos is just amazing! This B-17 rib piece just jumps off the page at you. There are other tats of planes as well as some fascinating black and white portraits.

The sites' owner states:

I am a pilot, and I am tattooed.

That statement itself is a bit of a paradox in the mind of many aviation and pilot folks out there.  By nature, the hobby and career attracts conservatively-minded people who may never consider tattoos as a form of expression.

If you have any interest in aviation or tattoos, or both, you really do owe yourself a a trip to this site!

If you've missed the whole social networking phenomenon that is Facebook, MySpace and others, you won't want to miss out on this one as an avid aviation enthusiast.

myTransponder.com is billing it self as THE socail networking site for pilots, students, fans and others interested in getting to know others of the same ilk. While currently in Beta, you can submit a request for Beta access and will mostly likely get granted access to the site. I mean, they let me in, so how tough can beta screening be?

The site includes such standard features as profile pages, friends, groups, messaging, blogs, photo galleries just like all the others but everything here has been specifically geared towards it's target audience.