At this stage the AfricanPlanes website provides the following functionality

News Feeds
Forum
Job Postings
Marketplace
GoogleEarth Integration
Shops
Links

• News Feeds
  News feeds of local and international news agencies and other aviation related websites are gathered and displayed as headlines and short summaries. The headlines are links to the full article on the provider's website. If you know about other news feeds you'd like to see included here, please let us know.

• Forum
  To post in the forum a user needs to be registered. Currently there are three forum categories.
  
  1) IT Solutions for Aviation
  Here we provide a platform to give opinions and ideas about how IT solutions could benefit the aviation community. Have you experienced or heard about online services in other countries that would also make sense here in Southern Africa? Do you see a way to improve the AfricanPlanes website or did you find a bug? Please tell us and others about it here.
  
  2) Groundschool
  This forum gives pilots, student pilots or any other interested person an opportunity to discuss their syllabus of training, post questions and ask for advice and guidance about anything related to flying and aviation. We also hope to be able to find answers to unclarities and vaguenesses in the available study notes, which then at a later point might be given as input to the training institutions to improve the quality of the study materials.
  
  3) General
  A forum for anything that is not related to the other topics.
  
  We are aware that the aviation community does not only consist of pilots. There are also air traffic controllers, maintenance organizations, charter companies, flying schools, etc. If you think there's a need for another dedicated topic, please contact us.

• Job Postings
  Please post vacant positions here. To do that you need to be a registered user and logged in.

• Marketplace
  The marketplace has categories for Propeller Aircraft, Jets, Helicopters, which can be browsed by any user. To post a 'for sale' advertisement here, a user needs to be registered and logged in. Each ad can contain three pictures. Naturally those should be exterior, interior and instrument panel. There's also a special category for Supplies and Accessories. The posted advertisement will remain active for thirty days. Five days before the expiry of the advertisement the user who posted the ad will receive an email reminder, which will then allow for an extension. Initially the advertisements will be for free. Depending on user response and acceptance levels we might consider asking for a certain fee per newly posted advertisement at a later stage. If you think there's need for another category, please let us know about it.

• GoogleEarth Integration
  The GoogleEarth integration has two parts. One part allows you to display your flight route that you have created and saved in EasyPlan in GoogleEarth. And you can also display all the locations of the weather radar and weather stations of the South African Weather Service. The placemarks link to the appropriate page on the weathersa website.

• Shops
  Users can search the complete product catalogue of amazon.co.uk. Only at the final step of the purchasing process will the user be re-directed to the amazon website. A Pilot Shop might be added at a later stage to the website.
  

• Links
  This part of the AfricanPlanes website has links to resources on the Internet that we think are of interest to our site's visitors. Please feel free to send us links you would like to see here. Commercial entities also have the opportunity to place links and banner links to their websites here. Please contact us for enquiries.

Plans for the near future

• Blog
  We are planning to give our users the opportunity to make a contribution to the contents of the website in the form of a blog or weblog. Are you involved in any project related to aviation, e.g. are you building your own kit plane? Do you want to tell others about the difficulties you had to overcome to obtain your licence? Did you have an interesting navigation exercise or flying safari? Or are you maybe in the process of starting a business in the world of aviation and you look for a chance to get some publicity? Please approach us with your story.

• Download Area
  There are a number of high quality software packages as well as training and exam preparation materials available in South Africa. The usual distribution channel for these products is via CDs that can be purchased in flying schools or pilot shops. A solution that suggests itself is to have those products available for download combined with a facility for online credit card payments. This is a service we are planning to provide to the authors of those materials.