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EuroGA Airports Database

martin-esmi wrote:

believe that if you are giving the option to search for NOTAMs (which makes sense), you must ensure access to a trusted source. If that’s not possible, then I think you should debate whether to keep that functionality, to not give incorrect information (even though most pilots will use other services I hope to do their planning)

I agree.

Just FYI, https://www.notaminfo.com/swedenmap shows them all, also a free service and one which I hardly believe is paying to get access to the NOTAMs.

It could extract them from aro.lfv.se. (The official Swedish briefing site.)

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 24 May 07:56
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Noticed it doesn’t display Æ, Ø and Å properly, at least not Å.

Thanks. I will get this looked at right away. It’s being dropped as a part of data sanitisation.

It could extract them from aro.lfv.se.

I really want to avoid doing this separately for every country in Europe. That’s why I am looking for a European source. If there is a free site which does worldwide airport notams, I am all ears I have emailed a couple of email addresses at Eurocontrol and will see what they come up with.

However, one or two years ago, Sweden moved non-instrument airport NOTAMs to a new NOTAM series. That made such NOTAMs disappear from some services

That is a really pointless policy but we have to work with it.

From vague memory, France blocked their distribution on the grounds that since the said airports were not capable of accepting international traffic, nobody should be flying directly to them. But they stopped this a long time ago. Maybe Sweden is doing it for the same reason, perhaps. Does Sweden show any notams for say LFLN? The internet renders this policy pointless; almost nobody is briefing from the departure tower like they used to 30 years ago.

This is the disclaimer: The weather and notams are sourced from the NOAA. Always check the validity dates of the information. Be particularly careful with notam validity as different sources select them for different date ranges. Not all airports issue weather or notams. I will expand it

The map is veeery slow when zoomed out.

Yeah… the implementation is sensitive to client device performance – another way of putting this is that it needs a fast device. There is a better implementation (a server-side map server which purely serves image tiles) but that would be a few days’ work (a lot of money). The map works fine for most people, at any sensible zoom level.

Only ICAO airports?

The database is a combination of several (see the FAQ) and should have almost everything of the slightest relevance to anybody reading this. I found another database the other day which even includes stuff like a South Pole research station.

We don’t currently have ZZZZ (farm strips basically) and this is being done, with what will be a nice interface for creating them. Obviously there is no “official” database of these, and a lot of the owners get really upset when their strip ends up on one.

When pushing “create new entry” is that a new report, or a new airport?

New report. Apart from ZZZZ nobody should need to create a new airport. Well, unless something has been missed, which is possible.

Actually nothing stops you from creating a new report which is a new ICAO code. Just type it in… I created one called TEST.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Yeah… the implementation is sensitive to client device performance – another way of putting this is that it needs a fast device.

Leaflet with preferCanvas: true seems to be doing considerably better than OpenLayers in the setting the app currently uses. I just set up a quick example on http://lab.jaszczur.org/ega/ to test how Leaflet would perform.

I’m no expert on OpenLayers. Perhaps it can also be tweaked. Anyway, switching the frameworks in case of this application should be trivial. Both are well established, well supported and fit for this relatively trivial task.

(OpenLayers was first and is traditionally considered much more powerful than Leaflet – which on the other hand is thought to be more ‘agile’ – eg. the OpenLayers JS code you load now is 141 kB, whereas Leaflet is 39k)

Edit: forgot to mention the most important thing! I’m so happy this project worked :) Thank you! Of course I will contribute and I hope to make good use of it when the Corona thing eases!

Last Edited by Mateusz at 24 May 09:49
EPKM, Poland

I am no expert on this but AFAICT the perf issue is not on the underlying map. You will notice the airport blobs are implemented only for Europe and the “popular” parts of N Africa. If you go away from that fairly readily visible rectangular area, the rendering is fine, I think.

It is to do with the rendering of the airport blobs. This is largely client-side. I think one needs to find out where the bottleneck is, before spending days on changing the data source for the background map. It might even be a simple config change which might make a big difference.

If the bottleneck is client-side then anybody with the right tools should be able to find it. A part of the problem is crappy Chrome, which allocates 100GB of RAM for every byte downloaded from a website Nothing can be done about that, of course. But you do see a big hit on CPU utilisation when thrashing around the map with lots of blobs showing.

The server is a very good one. Not the same as EuroGA.org (for security reasons; the airports site is in PHP) but same grade.

@atmilatos has done a lot of work on this, with a proper map server, which is the best way to do it, but I don’t really want to pay for that right now.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Another thing I noticed. There are no landing fees at Avinor airports, only take off fees. This may seem an irrelevant, and probably is for 99.99% of cases. But it has to be correct, so I have to write 0 in landing fee.

Payment method: You can only pick one, but usually there are several options (VISA and Mastercard for instance). Or do you mean the one used?

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Peter wrote:

I am no expert on this but AFAICT the perf issue is not on the underlying map.

Nope, I’m not talking about the underlying map – that’s openstreetmap and it’s fine.

There are however many JavaScript libraries for displaying maps (and associated content – such as these airport blobs) on web pages, with the ones I mentioned eariler (Leaflet and Openlayers) being the most popular. To put it short, you need extra code that draws the tiles, puts the blobs in places, handles all the map scrolling. The browsers do not implement any capabilities for displaying maps natively and it’s also the quality (and bloat) of this code that determines performance, in parallel with browser/hardware/OS etc.

The way you use and configure that map rendering thing also does matter, you obviously do it differently for different applications. For example Leaflet offers two completely different waypoint rendering modes – SVG (which is slower but more compatible) and Canvas (which is faster but less flexible and not supported by older browsers), with an option to use the latter by default and fall back to SVG if Canvas is not supported. Perhaps you can configure something similar in OpenLayers (the engine you currently use), I don’t know. If not, I am certain you can easily switch to Leaflet and have a well grounded suspicion it will improve performance compared to what you have now.

Anyway, please do pass my previous remarks to the guy writing the thing, he should be able to improve it :)

Last Edited by Mateusz at 24 May 10:40
EPKM, Poland

The three fee boxes can have a 0 or be left blank.

Yes, it is the fuel actually bought and how you paid. It was a common input to have multiple selects but as always it is a choice between getting at least some good info, and having the person running away screaming It’s the same with airport charges; I entered some myself and in some cases there were maybe 10 categories like nav charges, assistance (??), local mafia tax, etc. So the FAQ tells people to put in the landing and parking, and everything else goes into the handling box.

please do pass my previous remarks to the guy writing the thing, he should be able to improve it

Definitely; many thanks

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

From vague memory, France blocked their distribution on the grounds that since the said airports were not capable of accepting international traffic, nobody should be flying directly to them. But they stopped this a long time ago. Maybe Sweden is doing it for the same reason, perhaps. Does Sweden show any notams for say LFLN?

I’m not sure what international distribution would mean in Europe since all NOTAMs are in EAD. Swedish AIS publishes NOTAM bulletins on its web site for Scandinavia and the FIRs bordering the Baltic Sea. For all other NOTAMs they just link to EAD. Certainly NOTAMs for all Swedish airports are in EAD as are NOTAMs for LFLN.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Peter wrote:

That is a really pointless policy but we have to work with it.

There is no standard for NOTAM series (except for a few specialised series like series S for SNOWTAM). Generally speaking countries divide their NOTAMs into different series to simplify the decision on what is sent where. E.g. One series for airports likely to have intercontinental traffic, one series for airport likely to have European traffic etc. Sweden is no different in this respect.

The pointless thing is when a flight planning service provider such as SkyDemon or Autorouter is filtering received NOTAMs based on series.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

I’ve emailed a couple of Eurocontrol addresses to see what they can offer.

Otherwise, can anyone suggest an open and simple website which presents all the ones in EAD? For years I used to use IPPC for my private site but they killed it before the Airports project started. By PM would be preferred

One series for airports likely to have intercontinental traffic, one series for airport likely to have European traffic etc. Sweden is no different in this respect.

A job creation scheme Why not send them everywhere? The UK seems to… actually lots of countries do.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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