I threw together a very short demo of a partial flight route — the low-level airway V316 from Ottawa to Sault Ste. Marie — overlayed on Google Maps using the new Google Maps API (I’ve also mentioned this in a posting on my flying blog). Each marker on the map is a navigation transmitter or intersection. This could look an awful lot better, but it’s still more interesting than the default Hello World app.

Most of the work takes place in the google-map-demo.js JavaScript file, which is currently 38 lines long including comments. Note that it is table-driven, so it would be easy to modify it to run from a database or XML file. The google-map-demo.html HTML document runs my JavaScript showMap function on load, and contains a placeholder div element with the id “map”. The google-map-demo.css CSS stylesheet sets the dimensions of the div, draws a border, and makes the background white.

This is pretty simple stuff, but it’s a fun way to waste an hour or two on a holiday weekend. There’s a lot that could be done to make this look better, such as inserting frequencies for navigation aids and using custom marker icons.