The business and sport of aviation is about as mission critical as any human endeavor gets. Pilots have an implicit expectation for their aircraft to be well designed, ergonomic, predictable, reliable, and safe to operate. Certificated aircraft are designed and built to engineering and quality standards that far exceed those of any other consumer product. In my opinion, any computing environment used for aviation related applications should meet similar high standards. I also believe that the open software development model and the GNU/Linux operating system is the computing environment with the greatest potential to meet such high standards.
This document is intended to provide pointers to software packages that run under GNU/Linux and are usefull to pilots (private, commercial or military), airlines, airports or any actors in the aeronautical domain. Most of the software packages mentioned in this release are freely distributable, and come with source code. However, I will gladly include entries for commercial products from any vendors who are GNU/Linux friendly.
My own personal interests center around air traffic flow management since I have worked almost 4 years for Eurocontrol providing simulations to increase the safety and effeciency in the european sky. I wanted to be pilot, but with my color-blindness I have a bit abadon it. I know work for both USA and Europe world of traffic management, and it's exciting to see the difference and the history which created those.
Each of the software pointers in this document consists of a brief description of the software, information on who wrote it, where to find it, and user comments in some cases. In the interest of brevity, I did not include explicit pointers to source code or binaries when they are available through reasonably obvious links on the software's home page.