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The relevance of VACs - Visual Approach Charts - for VFR?

The online version of the VFR AIP of Poland is s
also labelled “not for operational use”. Yours is probably same, either openly or somewhere in the agreement you never read (I didn’t read it either).

tmo
EPKP - Kraków, Poland

I haven’t seen any evidence that EAD gets old versions of the AIP data.

It would have come to light if it did, by now, because various flight planning tools get the data from EAD, via a paid for B2B interface. They don’t get it from various national websites.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

I think that disclaimer is stupid

I think 99.9% of disclaimers are The point here is that you should use “updated”, “appropriate”, “adequate” etc information/charts. When Eurocontrol say in bold letters that the data should not be used for operational purposes, it can hardly be called any of those things. Factually, they are more than adequate IMO, but may not contain all information perhaps?

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

I think that disclaimer is stupid. Of course lots of pilots use EAD for AIP access – otherwise you have to know where every individual country has its own national website, and often it is more than one per country if you want both IFR and VFR stuff. And Germany (and Switzerland ?) have their VFR data behind a paywall…

The unfortunate thing is that Eurocontrol is not able or willing to force each member state to deposit its aeronautical data at EAD.

The EuroGA airport database is being enhanced to fill in some of the “VFR gaps”, by going to the national website if EAD returns nothing. Initially we are doing Croatia and Austria.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

From EAD login page:

EAD Basic is EAD’s free Public Access Service application for the general public. The solution allows you to browse the European AIS Database (EAD) for a limited set of aeronautical information via the web. EAD Basic is free of charge and can be accessed instantly, anytime and from anywhere.

The information accessible via EAD Basic is for general purposes only, For safety and security reasons, the data shall not be used for operational purposes.

I’m not sure these maps are country dependent. They could traditionally be, but today they seems more airport owner/operator dependent.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Poland (EP) does provide VFR resources via EAD, under the “VFR” authority type; IFR is under “civil” and there used to be a separate, now gone, MIL.

tmo
EPKP - Kraków, Poland

I have kicked off the coding for Croatia VFR. If EAD returns null, we will go to Crocontrol and present URLs from there.

I think that is safer, for various obvious and less obvious reasons.

There seems to be a severe shortage of other candidate countries whose AIP is available for free but is not at EAD, and to which anybody flies

But Croatia is a wonderful place to visit so that’s ok for a start and I know German and Austrian pilots will really appreciate a single place for AIPs since they are just up the road

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Well, the IFR AIP is at different URLs, that change each AIRAC cycle, but predictably so (the URL basically contains the date). So you can choose to use Eurocontrol for the IFR AIP, and Crocontrol for VFR. Or Crocontrol for all.

ELLX

That would be using Crocontrol for all airports, which is a reasonable approach.

I can’t see an objective reason for getting IFR ones from EAD and others from Crocontrol.

It is what I was hoping to avoid originally, of course.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

If you are willing to have it programmed, one could extract from
https://www.crocontrol.hr/UserDocsImages/AIS%20produkti/VFR_prirucnik/menu.html
the list of PDFs per airports and then give direct links to the PDFs, as you do for EAD.
Something like that with regular expressions, for example for LDRP:

grep LDRP menu.html | egrep ‘href=“[^”]LDRP[^"]"’|sed -e ‘s/.href=“\([^”]LDRP[^“]*\)”.*/\1/’|uniq

Then the URLs are the results of that
PDF/LDRP.pdf
PDF/Charts/LD_AD_2_LDRP_2-ADC_en.pdf
PDF/Charts/LD_AD_2_LDRP_2-VAC_en.pdf
with https://www.crocontrol.hr/UserDocsImages/AIS%20produkti/VFR_prirucnik/ prepended.

With a bit more work, you’d extract also the labels of the PDFs, in this case
LDRP – Data
LDRP – Aerodrome Chart
LDRP – Visual Approach Chart

ELLX
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