FAQ and Troubleshooting

🇮🇱 עברית

FAQ and Troubleshooting

Common questions

Is NavAid an official flight-planning tool?

No. NavAid is a free hobby project. Do not use it as the sole source for in-flight navigation. Always cross-check with current official charts and approved EFB software.

Does it work outside Israel?

Yes for map display (you can pan anywhere; OSM / Esri cover the world). The Navigation Waypoints and Airfields overlays are Israeli datasets only.

Is my route uploaded somewhere?

Most editing state lives in browser storage. Optional Drive sync, AI requests, flight-plan filing, and live aviation/weather requests send only the data needed for the invoked feature. The public web site also loads Google Analytics (GA4), which sees anonymous usage only — never a route, a position, a flight plan or a profile. It counts three buttons by name, with nothing attached: opening the ICAO flight plan, the cross-country plan or a parking request in your mail app. That says how often the feature is used, not who used it or what was sent. It is not loaded in the Android/iOS app, on staging, PR-preview or branch builds, or locally.

Can I use it offline?

Yes - install as a PWA and load your route at least once online to cache the app shell, datasets, and the chart tiles you have viewed. See Offline and PWA.

Why are the chart tiles sometimes blurry?

The chart provider serves a fixed tile pyramid (z13 max for CVFR). Above that zoom NavAid upscales tiles in the browser. For printable detail, use Save PNG - it renders at the layer's max native zoom regardless of on-screen zoom.

Why is the magnetic variation negative?

NavAid uses the value-added-to-true convention: magnetic = true + magVar. Israel is roughly 5° east of true north, so the value you add is -5. The hint next to the input shows the conventional (5°E) form for clarity.

How do I print just the flight plan, not the map?

Open the Flight Plan modal (📋) and click Print - that prints only the table. To print the map, use the A3 / A4 frame and ⬇ Save PNG, then print the PNG.

Can I share a route?

Yes, two ways:

• 🔗 Share — copies a self-contained URL of the current route to the clipboard (polyline-encoded coordinates + base64url names, up to 64 waypoints). The recipient just opens the link and NavAid loads the same route.
• Export / Import a file — export JSON (or GPX / PLN) and send it; the recipient Imports it.

Can NavAid open the BYOP airport charts?

Yes. Click a waypoint whose name matches an airfield ICAO (e.g. LLBG), and the inspector shows the available charts grouped by category (Approach, SID, STAR, Ground, VFR/Airport, Other). Click a chip to open the PDF in a full-screen viewer with Close, Download, and Open-in-Tab buttons.

Troubleshooting

"My route disappeared after a reload"

Possible causes, in order of likelihood:

1. Private / Incognito mode - localStorage is cleared when the window closes.
2. localStorage quota exceeded — NavAid alerts you when the quota is hit so you can export the route before continuing. Try exporting a few routes and clearing them.
3. You're on a different browser - localStorage is per-browser, per-device.
4. Corrupt saved route - current versions warn and preserve the original localStorage["navaid.route"] value instead of overwriting it. Export or inspect that value if you need to recover it manually.

Always Export valuable routes to a JSON file as backup.

"Import says my route JSON is invalid"

Route JSON validation is strict: documented fields must be present and correctly typed, and legs.length must match waypoints.length - 1. Extra fields are allowed, but missing fields such as waypoint name, leg inLabel.p, or note shape are rejected.

"The Save PNG output looks wrong / blank / clipped"

• NavAid locks map interaction during export so the overlay and tile grid stay aligned.
• Map opacity is applied to the exported base map; overlays remain full opacity.
• Flight-maps.com tiles outside chart coverage can return HTTP 404. Current export clips the tile grid to chart bounds and silently treats 404s as blank chart area, while still alerting on real failures such as network, CORS, 5xx, or decode errors.
• Enabled Navigation Waypoints and Airfields overlays are included in the export.

"Navigation-waypoint or airfield overlay disappeared and won't come back"

Toggle the overlay off and back on, or reload if the network is unavailable. Current loaders leave the dataset in a retryable state after transient failures.

"A note placed on a waypoint won't select"

Current hit testing follows paint order, so notes above waypoints should be selectable. If selection still feels ambiguous, zoom in or drag one element slightly apart.

"Hebrew text shows boxes / wrong characters"

Make sure your browser font set includes Hebrew. The page uses the OS default UI font; install Noto Sans Hebrew or Arial Unicode MS if you see tofu.

"I cleared cache and now NavAid won't load offline"

Open the site once with internet so the service worker re-registers and re-caches the app shell.

"Bing / Google can't find NavAid"

The site has SEO metadata, sitemap, hreflang, and Bing verification. Search indexing can still lag behind deploys by a few days.

"A button does nothing in the installed app"

It used to, and the cause was always the same one. A page does not own alert(), confirm() or prompt(): a browser may suppress them, and an Android WebView shows one only if the host app implements it — NavAid's shell does not. So in the APK every refusal was silent, and the control looked broken: the flight plan would not open, Stop sharing seemed stuck, the follow-me name button did nothing.

Every refusal is a toast now, and every question the app asks is its own dialog. If you find a control that still says nothing, that is worth reporting — it is a bug of this exact shape.

Reporting a bug

1. Check the open issues.
2. If new, open one - include browser + OS, steps to reproduce, expected vs actual.
3. If urgent and you can fix it, see Contributing.