Re: [Flightgear-devel] X-plane airport data

[Paul Surgeon]

On Thursday, 30 December 2004 23:26, David Luff wrote:
> I hadn't realised that state/province info was in the
> DAFIF - that's a pleasant surprise :-)

I looked into the data a bit more.
It seems that only the States of USA are in the data.
However when I looked at the province code for other airports there appears to 
be some sort of grouping - I'm not sure if it can be mapped directly to 
provinces though.
I'll hunt around and see if I can find some data elsewhere. The only problem 
is that most of the data one finds online is not very complete.

>I believe that we can assume that codes
> above 500 may be safetly used for FG use without conflict - maybe you could
> write a script that merges the country/province data with the master data
> using a couple of codes up in that range for now?

That's a good idea - thanks.

I looked at just using the 2 letter prefix in the ICAO code to map the 
airports to countries but that is not so straight forward.
For instance some countries have multiple ICAO prefixes.
Another interesting discovery is that there are lots of countries that share 
an ICAO prefix for navaids and waypoints.

DAFIF   Country   ICAO code 
code
===
AJ  AzerbaijanUB,UG,UR
AM  Armenia   UB,UD,UG

Looks like a new field in the airport DB would be a better idea.
Paul

___
Flightgear-devel mailing list
Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org
http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d

Re: [Flightgear-devel] X-plane airport data

[David Luff]

Paul Surgeon writes:

> I need country and state/province fields to be included in the X-Plane data 
> so 
> that I can sort and filter airports by country and state/province.
> 
> I thought of filtering by ICAO but that is not 100% accurate because 3 letter 
> IATA codes are GLOBAL. (e.g. London Heathrow = LHR)
> If it was just the 3 letter FAA codes it would have been easy.

The airport database uses ICAO codes, not IATA codes - Heathrow is EGLL.  In 
the US the codes are the same, but for the rest of the world they are (always?) 
different.  I'm not sure, but I'll hazard a guess that US airports might be the 
only ones in our database with 3 letter codes.

> This will also not provide me with state/province filtering which I would 
> like 
> to include.
> 
> The DAFIF data does include country codes as well as state/province codes per 
> airport.
> 
> Will we need this data in FG in the future?

I'd certainly like to see our airport selector use country and possibly 
state/province - it's pretty unusable at present (even if it did work) due to 
the sheer size of the database and the usability problems with the widget (no 
response to arrow keys, page up/down, mouse wheel, typing first letter of name 
etc).  I hadn't realised that state/province info was in the DAFIF - that's a 
pleasant surprise :-)

> My app is standalone so I can write my own DB's but I prefer to derive all my 
> data from FG otherwise one usually ends up with conflicting data when one DB 
> is not kept in sync with the other.
> 
> What's the best way to go about this?
> Should we :
> 1. modify our X-Plane database and include the fields and sit (yet again) 
> with 
> a non-X-Plane DB or
> 2. get Robin to include it in the main X-Plane airport database or
> 3. create an entirely new file to store the data in?
> 

2 would be ideal, but almost certainly subject to a time lag.  It might be best 
to ask Curt if he'll approach Robin with it for the best chance of success.  
However, either 1 or 3 would be good stop-gap measures to get you/us up and 
running until then.  I believe that we can assume that codes above 500 may be 
safetly used for FG use without conflict - maybe you could write a script that 
merges the country/province data with the master data using a couple of codes 
up in that range for now?

Cheers - Dave

___
Flightgear-devel mailing list
Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org
http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d