A few months ago, one was able to zoom in on VFR sectional maps in order to read particulars for a given airport, especially in urban areas. Now the map will zoom out, but not in. Even if one clicks to a free standing map, it will no longer zoom in to read details.
I just tried it on several of the options including Sectional. They all zoom to the same extent. That extent does not seem to be close enough to read the sectional VFR info. Don’t remember if they did zoom farther, I usually go to skyvector.com to check that closely. Maybe FA changed the max zoom at some point.
As I recall, during the map rewrite there was a special condition for the airport sectional pages (eg flightaware.com/resources/airpo … /sectional) that allowed for a greater-then-normal zoom level. During the course of the rewrite, I got rid of special conditions like that in favor of having standardized zoom limits across the site - so it doesn’t surprise me that the sectional map can’t be zoomed in as far as before.
The big problem is that the sectional imagery is of such low quality. We’re looking at making a vast improvement in the quality of this imagery soon, but there’s not a specific timeline I can point to right now.
In the meantime, I’ll take a look and see if it’s workable to increase the max allowed zoom on the sectional layers.
One additional level of zoom would be adequate to read the maps.
PClifton, thanks for the response. Software is always a moving target. 