UK equivalent of FAA / DAFIF Data

[Superpilot]

Hi,

Just wondering if it's possible to obtain a regularly updated listing of all Airfields in the UK (public and private, small and large) with things like frequencies, lat / long, and elevation data?

Obviously the listing must be easily portable to a database. Pooley's must have access to a similar thing but that's probably proprietary.

I know the DAFIF data contains a lot of UK airports but not the GA ones (too small for an F16 to land on). The FAA data contains all GA fields but is for US only (obviously). Do the CAA do an equivalent to the FAA's version one could subscribe to?

Thanks

[Keygrip]

Have a start with the on line subscription (freebie) to the UK Aeronautical Information Publication (http://www.ais.org.uk/aes/login.jsp;WLSSecurityAesSessionCookie=QasigXt6EL5IsQk3u7GIeb rxPkqbB7oRMbkInR4pSghtRZdyLpIy!-6337542479479066702!172422922!80!7002) as that is THE book.

[Superpilot]

Hi,

Thanks but they don't actually provide data I can play around with.

[Keygrip]

Play around with?

You asked for "a regularly updated listing of all Airfields in the UK (public and private, small and large) with things like frequencies, lat / long, and elevation data?"

I sent you the official answer.

If you tell us what you actually want - then you might get a more constructive answer for your individual purposes.

I'm sure that link will tell you (if you read the pages) that you can purchase a subscription to the AIP and receive a CDRom in your mailbox every month. That's how I get mine.

That should also comply with your question "Do the CAA do an equivalent to the FAA's version one could subscribe to?"

N.B. When you say "subscribe", we have "user fees" in the UK already. Seems we might have them in the USA next year, too.

[IO540]

Is this for the CoPilot program by any chance?

I came up against exactly the same problem when I played with it a year or two ago.

One can get the official data from the PDFs at ais.org.uk but it's awfully tedious. Or you could buy a copy of Navbox www.navbox.nl and click on each airfield and copy/paste the data into a table.

There are other sources e.g. various aircraft enthusiast websites but I wouldn't trust that data.

[rustle]

Per Mike's post last week, a lot of the PDFs on the AIS site are now "cut'n'paste-able" for non-commercial use.

http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=153614

You did want this data for non-commercial use??

[Superpilot]

Spot on IO540 !

Working on a major project, so I need data that is as RAW as possible, as I will have to implement routines that take the same data and convert it into something CoPilot can understand each time a new cycle is out.

[IO540]

I had some correspondence back then with one of the contributors to the Copilot database. I couldn't find the time to get all the data, double check it, double check it again, and format it into the right format, so I gave up on Copilot. I still run it on a cheap little PDA which I keep in the plane, for the W&B feature (great when the battery isn't flat, which on a PDA is not very often :O )

That's one of the problems with "free" software - it's hard to keep the data up to date. Like most of the PDA software, Copilot is great for the USA. For Europe, I use Navbox but they never did a PDA version. Americans have it easy because the US Govt makes all the data freely available. A lot of European data isn't available at all electronically other than from 3rd party outfits like Jepp who charge a great deal of money for wading through the stuff and stuff it into their database.

Digressing somewhat, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a PDA flight planning program which is suitably complete and accurate for Europe, not least because PDAs are a recent thing and accuracy comes only from a) commercial success and b) lots of users reporting any errors they find.

You could write a web script to lift the PDFs from the ais.org.uk website and extract the data.

Also, have a look at the www.ead.eurocontrol.int website (has a ludicrous java-heavy user interface which basically needs ADSL to work at all). This is a collection of various national AIPs. It has various report generation features; for example you can get a list of all DMEs starting with Afghanistan (really useful)... There may be something there which you can use.

[Superpilot]

Thanks for that!