"RST Engineering" wrote in message
...
I just looked for that feature, Andrew, and couldn't find it. Could you
give us a little more detail on where it is?

You can use the full form at:
http://www.airnav.com/airports/search.html
That's the form you get if you click on the "Advanced Search" button on the
"Airports" page.

Interestingly, the range options don't update when you change the units (km,
nm, or sm). Of course, that doesn't help here, since a nautical mile is the
longest unit available. But it means people wanting to work in km (for
example) are getting short-changed.

There's a shorter version here where you can enter the distances as text,
rather than picking from a list:
http://www.airnav.com/cgi-bin/airport-search

Unfortunately, the range limit isn't just in the form UI itself; it appears
that the CGI script enforces it too. If you enter a distance more than
200NM, a form comes back to get you to enter the distance again. I'm
guessing they do this in order to limit the work the database has to do (as
the range goes up, the number of potential hits goes up dramatically).

It is kind of ironic, given the regulatory requirement for a 200NM leg, that
200NM would be the upper bound for their search. I suspect there's a
chance that if someone sent them some email and explained why 300 or 400 NM
might be more useful to people doing the cross-country selection for a pilot
certificate, they might increase the limit.

Now, all that said...

I did a 100-200NM search from my home airport, and even with the shorter
distance, 86 airports showed up. Limiting that to paved airports with fuel
cut that in half, but it's still clear that a 200-300NM search (covering an
area almost twice as great) is going to produce a very large number of
choices. I'd say that a pure radius-based search may not really be as
useful as one might hope...it's better to start with at least an idea of a
general direction or destination, and using a chart makes this sort of
search easy.

As for the the WAC not being available...I'm not sure why the WAC was
mentioned specifically. All of my certificate-requirement
long-cross-country flights were doable on a single sectional. Even if one
doesn't have a WAC handy (and frankly, this is a good example of why you
ought to buy one at least once...they can be very useful), the sectional
chart that every pilot ought to have handy should be sufficient.

Pete