Waymark Flight

Overview #

Waymark Flight answers the questions a pilot or drone operator asks about the airspace around them. You describe the airspace — a few circles and rings with floors and ceilings — and give the last seconds of the flight; it says which areas the aircraft is inside, whether it is flying under a shelf, what boundary it will cross next and when, how far it is from the nearest restricted area and what to do about it. It can also propose a route from one point to another that stays out of the areas it must avoid.

Waymark Flight is the airspace model of the Waymark series. It reads an airspace scene of up to 24 cylinder or ring-shaped volumes — Class B, C and D surface areas and shelves, restricted and prohibited areas, temporary flight restrictions (TFR) and military operations areas (MOA) — plus an observed flight track of up to twelve points and the kind of mover (drone, light aircraft, helicopter or jet). One forward pass returns the containment set, the ring tier, whether the mover is under a shelf, the next boundary event with its ETA, whether the projected track enters a hazard volume, lateral and vertical margins to the nearest active hazard, the ceiling overhead and an advisory. Its planning decoder proposes up to eight waypoints that avoid restricted, prohibited and TFR volumes and, unless a clearance is allowed, controlled airspace, within the mover’s altitude envelope (drones at most 400 ft above ground).

Containment, boundary events and route planning are all solvable exactly with code, and the Falcon API runs that code on every request. Waymark Flight’s value is a robust reading from noisy, partial tracks — where the exact check, applied to a jittery track, misses more hazard entries than the model does — and fast combined answers in one pass. The exact checker is the guarantee: every reading is returned beside the exact one, the served advisory is the more cautious of the two, and every served route has passed the exact validator.

Waymark Flight is decision support and education only. It is not certified for navigation, and its training airspace is synthetic.

Intended use #

• Flight-training and education tools that explain where an aircraft stands relative to layered airspace, with the exact answer shown beside the model’s.
• Drone-planning and simulation tools that want a quick reading of a noisy track and an early warning of a hazard entry.
• Proposing a route through a caller-supplied scene that stays clear of restricted, prohibited and TFR volumes, validated before it is returned.
• Research on learned airspace readings, using the exact check and the disagreements field as a running comparison.

Out of scope #

• Navigation, flight planning of record, or any decision where a wrong answer has physical consequences. Not a navigation or safety system.
• Knowing real airspace: Waymark Flight does not know real charts, NOTAMs or TFR schedules and never looks them up; the caller supplies every volume.
• Polygonal or irregular airspace, airways, terrain, weather, traffic and wind; volumes are circles and rings only.
• Altitudes above 18,000 ft MSL, more than 24 volumes, or tracks longer than twelve points.

Choose Waymark Flight when #

• The question is about an aircraft or drone in a described airspace: what it is inside, what comes next, and how to route around what it must avoid.
• The track is noisy or partial and a reading robust to tracker jitter matters, with the exact check alongside.
• The scene is a photographed street and the mover is a person — choose Waymark Extra to simulate a walk, or LIM3D-XL to read an observed track.
• Only an exact answer is needed and no model reading is wanted — the exact checker alone is the right tool; Waymark Flight returns its result in exact on every call.

Specification #

Try it #

You send

A small scene with a Class B surface area, one shelf and a restricted area, and a light aircraft cruising east at 2,500 feet toward the restricted area.

You get back

Inside nothing yet, not under the shelf, the restricted area about four and a half minutes ahead, so monitor; and a route that bends south around it.

The same exchange as the API sees it:

{
  "volumes": [
    {"id": "B0", "kind": "class_b", "center": {"x_nm": 0, "y_nm": 0}, "radius_nm": 5, "floor_ft": null, "ceiling_ft": 10000, "airport": "Field A", "field_elev_ft": 0, "tier": 0, "name": "surface area"},
    {"id": "B1", "kind": "class_b", "center": {"x_nm": 0, "y_nm": 0}, "radius_nm": 10, "inner_radius_nm": 5, "floor_ft": 3000, "ceiling_ft": 10000, "airport": "Field A", "field_elev_ft": 0, "tier": 1, "name": "shelf 1"},
    {"id": "R1", "kind": "restricted", "center": {"x_nm": -2, "y_nm": -7}, "radius_nm": 2, "floor_ft": null, "ceiling_ft": 6000, "name": "example restricted area"}
  ],
  "track": [
    {"t_s": 0, "x_nm": -12.9, "y_nm": -7, "alt_ft": 2500},
    {"t_s": 10, "x_nm": -12.6, "y_nm": -7, "alt_ft": 2500},
    {"t_s": 20, "x_nm": -12.3, "y_nm": -7, "alt_ft": 2500},
    {"t_s": 30, "x_nm": -12.0, "y_nm": -7, "alt_ft": 2500}
  ],
  "mover": "light"
}

{
  "ok": true,
  "engine": "waymark-flight",
  "model": {"inside": [], "tier": "none", "under_shelf": false, "next_event": {"volume": "R1", "kind": "enter_lateral", "eta_s": 259}, "hazard_entry": true, "margin_lat_nm": 7.9, "margin_vert_ft": 10000, "ceiling_ft": 18000, "advisory": "monitor"},
  "exact": {"inside": [], "tier": "none", "under_shelf": false, "next_event": {"volume": "R1", "kind": "enter_lateral", "eta_s": 267}, "hazard_entry": true, "margin_lat_nm": 8.0, "margin_vert_ft": 10000, "ceiling_ft": 18000, "advisory": "monitor"},
  "advisory": "monitor",
  "disagreements": [],
  "notice": "Decision support and education only. Not certified for navigation."
}

Limits & safety #

Out of scope: real flight operations, dispatch, drone operations of record, and any use where a missed boundary has physical consequences. Hosts should show the exact reading beside the model’s and treat a non-empty disagreements list as a prompt to check, never as a vote.

• Not certified for navigation. Not a navigation or safety system; no answer is a clearance or an instruction.
• Synthetic, illustrative airspace: the training scenes use made-up dimensions, and Waymark Flight is not a source of real airspace data.
• The caller supplies the volumes. Waymark Flight does not know real-world airspace, NOTAMs or TFR schedules; a volume the caller leaves out does not exist for it, and active is whatever the caller says.
• Weakest near boundaries (within a few hundred feet or about 0.1 NM), under heavy tracker noise and for very slow drones. Missed hazard entries in the evaluation: 1.4 % held-out, 1.7 % dense, 0.9 % shelf transit, 4.2 % fast jets, 6.9 % slow drones, 7.1 % boundary-near and 9.3 % under heavy noise.
• False alarms are the price of fewer misses: up to 10 % of slow-drone tracks raise a hazard entry that the clean track does not have.
• The model’s own route proposals fail the exact validator often in dense layouts (27.8 % valid on dense restricted sets); only the served route, after the check and fallback, is guaranteed valid — and only against the volumes supplied.
• Circles and rings only, at most 24 volumes, twelve track points and 18,000 ft; a constant-velocity projection of 300 s cannot anticipate a turn.

Related models #

Latest versions #