flash actionscript: Would Flash make a good tool for displaying animated replay of airplane flights
paths?

I am working for a company in the airport noise industry and we have developed
software that merges noises recorded around airports with flights. Users can
investigate abnormal noise events by reviewing information for flights during a
given time period.

We would like to develop a version of this software to be available on the web
to people living around certain airports. We will need to be able to query
remote servers for flight data, maps, and some tool for providing lat/long data
based on a user's zip code, etc.

I guess the biggest question is if Flash is designed to take information "on
the fly" such as the flight track data points, do some processing of the data
and then display the graphical representation to the user? Also, can various
elements be possitioned and even layered accurately in Flash? For example I
would need to have multiple "layers" dedicated to map details for an airport
and surrounding areas (Layer 1 - basic terrain, L2 - major highways and
streets, L3 - rivers and waterways, etc). I would then need to be able to draw
the flight path accurately over the map in a separate layer. I would also want
to be able to indicate to the user their location on the map in a separate
layer, etc.

I have had no exposure whatsoever to Flash's capabilities and don't know if we
would be better off just working with SVG or OpenGL or something along these
lines???

Any suggestions or thoughts would be helpful...

I did post this in the general area as well... not knowing which location
was appropriate.

Thanks,
Rob

Flash is capable of all those things.
It can take direction or data from a server and adapt the appliaction to that.
All of your ideas are possible as long as you have someone who is familiar
with ActionScript.

Layering in flash is just like any other art app. You can have many alyers
with transparencies and vector as well as bitmaps. I dont think SVG is even an
option but I am also not that familiar with OpenGL.

Again you cna load server info right into flash everytime it starts or any
other point- say when a user requests it. As far as pointing out where you
are on a map you could use _x and _y of the flash stage in relation to the
overall map and so on. This could totally work, besides that it would look
good.