New updates and features at Fly2Lunch.com

Several of Fly2Lunch's main pages now have a cleaner, more consistent look at 790px wide, with improved support for phones and other small screens.

• Home page: the four search boxes (Airport Restaurant Search, Airport Info, Fly-in, and Route Planner) now use a responsive layout. On desktop they stay in roughly the same positions as before. On a phone or narrow screen they stack vertically in that order, with recent reviews below. The site header and footer also adapt to small screens. The logo and navigation links stack instead of sitting side-by-side, and the title banner background scales to fit. The main site is now intended to work on mobile devices directly, rather than redirecting to the separate mobile site.
• Restaurant and airport information: clearer sections for restaurant details, hours, airport information, reviews, remarks, and maps. Individual restaurant pages also now include a Suggest an edit option for reporting name, location, or closed-listing problems. Suggestions are sent for review without changing the live database automatically.
• Restaurant search results: maps now appear above the results, with a more compact 790px results table, alternating row colors, and improved display of Props ratings.
• Route Planner: route information, distance summaries, warnings, and the route map now appear in organized bordered sections with improved small-screen behavior. Empty or invalid routes show a clear message with a link back to try again.
• Existing route calculations, restaurant links, map markers, and page-specific login and crawler protections were preserved.

The Route Planner now lets you set how far off-route to look for restaurants (search width in nm) and which restaurant distances to include (on the airport, short walk, etc.). Also cleaned up the spacing and layout on the home page search boxes.

Rebuilt the back end FAA database import routines to work with php8.5. Also improved the UI on those to make it easier to track the multi-hour progress while the databases are updating.

Updated the UI on: My Account, Login, Change Password, Forgot Password, Change Email, Register, Email Confirmation, Restaurant Update to match the newer/not-quite-so-2000s style.

Fly2Lunch has been running on very old server software for a long time. Over the last few weeks we completed a major back-end upgrade so the site now runs on PHP 8.5, with updated database code and other fixes needed for modern hosting. You should not notice any difference in how you search airports or post reviews. The goal was to keep everything working while making the site faster to maintain and more secure going forward. (Cheaper too...paying the web host to support 20 year old php was not cheap.)

Profile photos (My Account)

• You can upload much larger photos (up to 32 MB; JPEG, PNG, or WebP).
• After you choose a photo, you can drag and zoom to crop a square for your profile picture.
• Saved photos are still the same size as before (150×150 on your profile, plus a small thumbnail used elsewhere on the site).
• Your profile photo should stay up to date when you change it, without the browser showing an old cached image.

Reviews and fly-in comments

• If you include a web address in a restaurant review or fly-in description (for example https://example.com or www.example.com), it now appears as a clickable link when others read it.
• Links open in a new browser tab. Only normal http and https addresses are turned into links.

We also fixed several behind-the-scenes issues with where uploaded files were stored on the server and improved error handling when posting reviews. If anything looks wrong after the upgrade (maps, login, reviews, or your profile photo) please email contact@fly2lunch.com.

Over the last almost-19 years (!!), the FAA database structure and some core info has changed several times. This data creep has caused several, umm, bumps in the road for the Fly2Lunch databases. Because of those changes, there were some restaurant reviews that got mis-matched to the wrong airport. I added some more code to help align the inconsistencies with multiple fallbacks pairing trees and flags for manual auditing.

If you see issues with the restaurant database or strange, far-away airports showing up in your searches, please send an email to contact@fly2lunch.com

Added better back-end verification when restaurant reviews are submitted to hopefully eliminate spam.

For those of you looking to fly at least a specific distance from an airport, I added a minimum radius to the restaurant search.

Thanks to all of you who left reviews saying that specific restaurants were closed. I've removed all the closed restaurants from the database. If you know of any other restaurants that are closed, please leave a 1-prop review and write "closed" in the review section.

Turned the wrench on a few map-related items.

• Fixed the SkyVector map on the Restaurant Search Results page.
• Added a back-end billing account to use the Google Maps API again.
• Google Maps are now tested & working again across all pages.
• For users that aren't logged in, Google Maps was removed from individual restaurant pages. This is in hopes of limiting bots costing us money with unneeded Google Maps API usage. If you're a real person, please log in to your account so you'll see the restaurant & airport pages normally.
• Updated the top banner background sectional image.
• Added a Buy Me a Coffee button at the top of the page. I'd really appreciate any support you can give. Thanks!

Previously, the recent reviews on the home page showed all the reviews from the last 7 days. Now, it shows at least 3 reviews even if they were longer than 7 days ago.

My recent bump to encrypt the http stream clobbered the SkyVector maps. They're now fixed on the restaurants and fly-in pages.

The FAA database structure has changed several times since I started Fly2Lunch. I just finished a complete rewrite of the back-end database import, indexing & meshing code. I'm happy to say that Fly2Lunch now has current airport data again.

Set up an SSL certificate on Fly2Lunch. You'd think that a web host would just include that for all your domains, but no. Fly2Lunch: more secure!

Added an favicon file.

Fixed some issues with adding new restaurant reviews. Added a link on the page at the end of adding a new review to the restaurant page and improved the redirection logic.

Fixed an obscure bug that was causing some login issues after registration for some users.

If you're having a login issue, please go here to request a new password: http://www.fly2lunch.com/forgot.php

After you login with the temporary password, please go here to change it to something more secure: http://www.fly2lunch.com/changepass.php

Worked on some style improvements to bring the look of Fly2Lunch a little ahead of its original 2007 design.

Researched the Google Maps API changes...again. It looks like I'll have to start paying for Google Maps integration.

Removed a closed restaurant.

Added captcha and back-end techniques to a few pages to help fight spam bots. For now, we have this fairly limited - hopefully we can keep it that way. If you have any problems, let us know through the contact link at the bottom of the page.

Deleted 26 closed restaurants. The airport restaurant business is tough already. With the pandemic, many were hit especially hard. Thanks to the business owners for working so hard and trying their best to make it. We're sorry to see each of you go. Pilots, please support airport restaurants as much as you can so we can all enjoy them in the future!

A few restaurants moved locations, so their airport proximities were updated.

Google killed off their Maps v2 support, so we rewrote everything to support Maps v3. I you see a map not working correctly, please let us know.

It look them about 14 years to figure it out, but a bot found a way to post some garbage restaurant reviews. The reviews were just scrambled letters and blank fields, but nobody wants that - right? So, we cleaned up all the fake/bot reviews we could find. We're looking into ways to keep that from happening again. Expect some changes to the login, signup and/or review posting pages soon.

Some formatting around the recent reviews on the main page got messed up. Fixed!

Google updated their terms of service which now requires sites like Fly2Lunch to pay Google if they use over a certain amount of Map data. Just the web search engine hits on Fly2Lunch put us over that amount. So, we put in logic to detect search engine crawlers & other bots and we now don't serve the Google Maps to those. If all goes well, that'll keep Fly2Lunch under the limit to avoid charges from Google.

A back end server upgrade was causing some errors when users added new reviews. The database server interface code was modified to fix these problems. If you see any other issues when entering restaurant reviews or fly-ins, please let us know.

We removed all of the known closed restaurants in our database. If you know of any restaurants that are closed, please leave a 1-prop review and write "closed" in the review section.

Several new restaurants were added.

We also noticed that if you add a restaurant review with an apostrophe anywhere in it (restaurant name, review, etc), our server kicks it back as an error. Our host provider has done more upgrades since the original website code was written and that appears to have clobbered those dreaded apostrophes.

We also fixed the Google Maps integration. You should now see the cool maps showing your routes and restaurants along the way.

Several weeks ago, a server upgrade with our host provider broke many of the pages here at Fly2Lunch. Everything is back up & running now. You should also notice a much more responsive site. Enjoy!

If you don't have a currently saved search, fly2lunch will now attempt to find the closest airport to you based on your IP address. Keep in mind that IP addresses can't give a perfect latitude and longitude. The default search may not be the absolute closest airport to your computer, but it should be close.

Apple's new iPad is a mobile device, but it has an extremely capable broswer. After testing the site with the iPad simulator, we've decided to send the iPad to the full desktop site. Enjoy!

We're happy to announce twitter integration at fly2lunch! Now, when you post a restaurant review at fly2lunch, a message with a link is posted to http://twitter.com/fly2lunch - Follow fly2lunch on twitter!

Until now, fy2lunch has been supported by Google ads. To make the site more user friendly, we're in the process of removing the ads. Everything else will remain the same & the site will remain free. Instead, do us a favor and...
Tell your friends about fly2lunch.com!

The fly2lunch mobile web page has been around for a long time. We just updated a few things to make the web page more usable on mobile devices, including the iPhone. When you browse to fly2lunch.com on your mobile device, you should automatically get redirected to the mobile site. If you don't, you can click on the "Mobile Site" link at the bottom of the page or request the mobile site directly by typing in this url: mobile.fly2lunch.com.

You can now purchase fly2lunch apparel. Check out the selection at the Fly2lunch.com Official Store.

Registered users can now see recent blog posts from all their fly2lunch friends in one place. You can also post directly to the blog feed from this page, so it can be used as one-stop-shopping to chat back & forth with your friends. Posts made from this page will not show on your user page. However, posts made from your user page will show on both.

See the Friend blog feed here. (If you are not signed in to your fly2lunch account, you'll be required to sign in first)

Registered users can now see recent blog posts from the entire fly2lunch community using the "Public blog feed" link at the top of the page. This can be used to see what interesting things are going on or to find new friends. Since users can post to their blogs about anything, you stand a chance for some very interesting reading. To cut down on spam and other inappropriate content, users are required to register for a free account & log in prior to using the Public blog feed section.

See the Public blog feed here. (If you are not signed in to your fly2lunch account, you'll be required to sign in first)

Registered users now automatically have a user page that they can user as a central launch point for fly2lunch. The user pages list the user's restaurant reviews, information about the user's aircraft, and show a personalized photo. There is also section displaying your friends with links to their user pages. The prime content on your user page is up to you to create through the blog section in the middle of the page. You can post blog comments so that everyone or just your friends can see them.

There are links to users' pages on every restaurant review or fly-in comment they post. Too add someone as a friend, click on the "Add as a Friend" link at the top of their user page. The user will then see a friend request on their page and can accept your friend request by clicking on the green checkmark next to your name.

To cut down on spam and other inappropriate content, users are required to register for a free account & log in prior to using the user page section.