Nighthawk

first off, great site. I'm really enjoying using it. There's also a little bit of community spirit which it would be great to develop - when I was in Almaty I found a small group of spotters and 5 of us went out to the back end of the airport at 1am on a freezing December early morning to see the An225 as she came through. I'm in Colombo now and am in contact with a young chap who runs a small facebook group for spotters.
If any member comes through here I would be happy to meet up, show a couple of places for spotting and take them to the Air Force Museum at Ratmalana which is one of the better museums that I have seen.

Anyway, a few of thoughts/ideas?

1- any way to have a list of suggested places for spotting at various airports? Other than the forum which would be cumbersome to search once it grow.

2- any way to have a list of people and places offering to meet up? As above.

3- In our "my sightings" and "my flights" lists, is it possible to offer a "top 25" or "top 40" option? As I have been seeing more A319s, A321s etc my favourite Tu154s and IL86s are dropping off the bottom so I'd like to see them!

4- In adding multiple sightings, is it possible to dedupe them? I only log an aircraft as seen once, and use the "add multiple sightings" option it adds all, whether I have seen them before or not.

5- last one! I log each flight on each aircraft, so there's a number if aircraft I have flown 4, 5 or more times. Any way to add an option to list which aircraft by the most times flown?

Thanks! Cheers and all the best

Thanks for the suggestions!

I've not been able to dedicate much time to PlaneLogger recently, but I'm hoping to be able to do so in the next few months. The priority at the moment is to try and fix some of the performance issues, the site is far too slow at the moment!

The social side is something I've always been keen to develop more, but so far haven't had much luck. I'd love to get the forums more active and encourage more conversation, beyond just requests for new registrations to be added. So any suggestions here are particularly welcome!

The ignoring regs you've already seen suggestion is one we get a lot, and one I've never really understood - I've always found it interesting to see how many times and where I've seen a particular aircraft. It's difficult to build a system that caters for both needs, which is why it hasn't really been addressed so far. I'm open to suggestions and feedback regarding this.

If anyone else has any other suggestions for features they'd like to see, do let me know!

Hi Nighthawk,

I agree it can be interesting to track multiple sightings of the same aircraft - I do log each flight and am interested to count how many times I've flown particular aircraft (hence the 5th suggestion above). In the very early spotting days I did count how many times I'd seen a particular aircraft but then when I used to work at LHR I stopped - I would see the same 737s, 757s etc several times a week so my sightings would have been in the tens of thousands!

Would be great to develop the social side and get the forum more active. If anyone else is reading this, feel free to make suggestions!

I guess a nice starting point would be a forum for suggesting good places to spot (my favourite was always the restaurant in Scheremetyevo Terminal 1, overlooking the runway so I could eat blini and drink vodka while watching Tu154sm Tu135s and An24s take off and land!). However a "good places to spot" thread would be hard to search to look for places when needed. Is there any way to have sub-threads in a conversation, so we could have a thread for each city? Or a second forum.....

Cheers

I for one would like to see the forums more active, it’s the most disappointing thing about this site in my opinion. Spotting locations a great subject, as compared to a lot of you guys I’m really only getting started with my spotting, a comprehensive list of good spots and how to get to them would be very helpful for me. My main airport at the minute is Dublin, bit of a journey for me but it’s well worth it, there’s a ridge overlooking the main runway, I’m sure everyone knows about it. I also fly across to Manchester a few times a year and visit the runway visitor park, excellent views and facilities for a day out.

Hi Kas0786,

When at Manchester, the south side of the airport is also good for spotting and it's free. You can park on the country lanes close to a track which parallels runway 2. Hope this is helpful.

John.

I have 2 suggestions.

On the home page could we have something like the last 10 flights flown by members? also when in an aircraft's page could we also see flights on that aircraft that members have added?

If possible, I would like to have the option to mark (follow, connect with, watch, what ever social media term fits the purpose best) other users, who are friends, and I would like to be able to see their entire log (not just recent sightings).

Re spotting locations:

I am an author/editor for www.spotterguide.net . We have quite a number of guides published on our website, but certainly far from all. So if you have an airport, which is not listed yet, or have new or better spotting locations for existing guides, it would be great if those would be communicated in a specific forum section/thread.

Cheers, Thomas