Airspace coordinates

[oversteer]

Is there a website or download which lists all the airspace areas in the UK and their bounding coordinates ? The half-mil isn't really useful when relating to minor ground features.

[TCAS FAN]

Try the UK AIP ENR section, it lists coordinates for CTAs.

NATS | AIS (http://www.nats-uk.ead-it.com)

[chrisN]

Oversteer, what do you want the data for?

There is a small army of people who prepare, on a voluntary basis, airspace definition files for use with UK gliding moving map software. There are several versions of the files, in different formats, to suit different software purveyors.

These people do it because there is no authoritative source for some of the data from the CAA or anywhere else.

(I am not myself an expert on this, just a user, so what follows is my interpretation of what I have been told.)

Just one example – an airway is defined in the UKAIP as a 10 nm wide chunk whose centreline is defined, terminating where it intersects the boundary of an LTMA segment. The boundary is defined as a series of straight lines joining specified points. The airway end points can be calculated from these two sets of data. Each person doing this has their own spreadsheet or equivalent for doing the calculations.

Some more complicated points require an interpretation of the official data, and two different people might make quite reasonable different interpretations in the absence of anything official.

I use one of these, and so have a file that contains the interpreted data as a text file. It must be somebody’s copyright, and comes with disclaimers, as one might expect.

I believe that the community of these people communicate with each other, at least to some extent, and do some cross checks so that most if not all errors are eliminated.

I don’t know how companies do it who sell their data, or how robust their process is.

Chris N.

[oversteer]

Yes, it is for gliding. For example local area soaring leaves me at risk of straying into a TMA, above certain heights, and I just want to look on a map/Google Earth etc and definitively know where the area extends to; or at least, know the 'grey area' so I can avoid.

[chrisN]

Oversteer, I don’t understand why you don’t already have, or have access to, what you want.

If you don’t have a moving map display, the 1:500,000 chart shows it. If you have a PDA to show a moving map, there is software, some free, that will display it, and the update files are free from several sources.

If you just want to look at the calculated points and draw it out for yourself or whatever, just open one of the free text files.

There has been plenty of discussion at times on u.r.a.s – do you use that?

If there is some question you have that these don’t address, can you explain more what it is?

Chris N.

[LH2]

There is a Google Earth KMZ with global airspace already out there (of course, not sure how up to date, etc.) Shouldn't be too difficult to Google... I don't have a link handy atm.

[oversteer]

I don't have a moving map yet - but have found the KML which gives me enough information at this stage. :ok: