Since I found that the supplied airport data in Virtual Airlines Manager was not suitable for several reasons , I had to think of what data do I need and where can I get what I feel is better data.
I sat back and looked at how I use flight simulation and how what I needed from that to accomplish my needs.
I found it easy to think about this , I fly with the X-Plane flight simulator with various aircraft some of which are payware. When I fly I like to use the auto-pilot and thus follow a flight route in the FMC computer. Thus I have a subscription to Navigraph to update my FMC data each month on their release cycle and I create my flight plans using SIMBRIEF.
So I looked into what I get from Navigraph and I found that I can get a list of all the Airports and Latitude and Longitude in a text file
NZSP-89.981947-144.063631
Where NZSP is the ICAO code and the Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates.
This is a starting point as with this file I get nearly 13500 airports that I could program a route in flight simulator to and from.
As you can see this is not much information at all but of course very vital for flying in X-Plane.
I looked at the airport table in Virtual Airline Manager and all of the software package and found that I could trim the number of field down to these -:
I sat back and looked at how I use flight simulation and how what I needed from that to accomplish my needs.
I found it easy to think about this , I fly with the X-Plane flight simulator with various aircraft some of which are payware. When I fly I like to use the auto-pilot and thus follow a flight route in the FMC computer. Thus I have a subscription to Navigraph to update my FMC data each month on their release cycle and I create my flight plans using SIMBRIEF.
So I looked into what I get from Navigraph and I found that I can get a list of all the Airports and Latitude and Longitude in a text file
NZSP-89.981947-144.063631
Where NZSP is the ICAO code and the Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates.
This is a starting point as with this file I get nearly 13500 airports that I could program a route in flight simulator to and from.
As you can see this is not much information at all but of course very vital for flying in X-Plane.
I looked at the airport table in Virtual Airline Manager and all of the software package and found that I could trim the number of field down to these -:
However of course I started by creating the data from my NAVIGRAPH file as I had 3 elements of the table already and the first field is just an incremental number and the key to the file is the 'ident' field.
I started by building a master procedure PHP script that would eventually run everything in order and then I built a script to build any database tables that I would need to use to create the new master records for VAM.
Thus at the end of the first part in theory I had a new Airport table with 13500 records
But there are missing details such as below
So where can I get the rest of the information from if possible ?
There are many databases and software API's available and some are the same source as VAM and as such may not be upto date and are more flight simulation based than current real world.
These source fall into three categories
FREE - these tend to be limited in data quality and content but some of them relate to real world aviation and as such can be treated with more respect.
SMALL CHARGE - Now we are getting more into data that is for the real world aviation situations and as such some of these can be a good source as you can get the data you want without great expense, however these sites operate often on a capped subscription with a limit on hits to their data.
EXPENSIVE these are ok if you can afford them as they are the most comprehensive and correct real-world data available they can from the same vendor as the small charge group but contain more data.
The secret is to seek what I needed at good real world accuracy and without great expense and hopefully FREE .
These source fall into three categories
FREE - these tend to be limited in data quality and content but some of them relate to real world aviation and as such can be treated with more respect.
SMALL CHARGE - Now we are getting more into data that is for the real world aviation situations and as such some of these can be a good source as you can get the data you want without great expense, however these sites operate often on a capped subscription with a limit on hits to their data.
EXPENSIVE these are ok if you can afford them as they are the most comprehensive and correct real-world data available they can from the same vendor as the small charge group but contain more data.
The secret is to seek what I needed at good real world accuracy and without great expense and hopefully FREE .
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