James Turner writes: > So ... what sort of approach should I be investigating? Would we want > to support loading the 'raw' DAFIF data into flightgear, so people can > just download it directly to update to a new AIRAC cycle, or is that > way too much data to contemplate? I'm still trying to get a handle on > the data format and how much of it is useful / useless to us at > runtime, so any / all information people have would be gratefully > received.
First, forget the native fixed-field DAFIF format and go for DAFIFT -- it's the same stuff in a simple tab-delimited format. Second, DAFIF is incomplete outside the US, at least -- all of the navaids and waypoints are there (as far as I can tell), but many airports are missing, and there only a small selection of IFR approaches. The DAFIF is also missing the hand-drawn taxiway data from Robin's database, but we'll have to replace that eventually anyway. > Also, if there's some other source for this kind of data we should be > looking at, please let me know. There are several. The FAA publishes complete data for the U.S. -- it is free to redistribute, but you have to pay to order the CD in the first place. People tend to put it online. Robin Peel's data are also useful, of course. Finally, you'll have to solicit user contributions for smaller airports, especially outside the U.S. I agree that the DAFIFT stuff is the most solid starting foundation. You might want to talk with Paul Tomblin, a Piper pilot and Linux user in Rochester -- he maintains a free database for the excellent (and also free) Palm Pilot CoPilot program, which I use for most of my real-world flight planning. He gets contributions from pilots around the world, so the data are pretty solid: http://xcski.com/~ptomblin/CoPilot/ All the best, David -- David Megginson, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
