Justin Gombos wrote:
On 2006-04-07, Roy Smith wrote:
Justin Gombos wrote:
I'll start with a rant; it's disturbing to find that the Department
of Transportation ("DOT") does not release the AFDs in a useable
digital format.
Of course they do.

Have a link for that?


Sites like airnav get their airport and navaid info from the FAA
Aeronautical Information Services ATA-100 database. The AIS is,
according to their website is the "single authoritative government
source for collecting, validating, storing, maintaining and
disseminating aeronautical data concerning the United States"

http://www.faa.gov/ATS/ata/ata100/index.html

You can get the ATA-100 through a subscription CD service or also if you
register for FTP access. The databases have also been re-published
online at:

http://aviationtoolbox.org/raw_data/FAA/ATA-100/

A word of warning though, the raw airport info is contained in a text
file that is 140 Mb when uncompressed. Opening it in windows notepad is
probably not a good idea.

My interpretation is that this data is just as legal as a paper AF/D
since this is the official source of the AF/D. So you can probably
argue that as long as you can verify that the source database is
current, using a website like airnav which parses the database for you
is also legal.

- Ray


--
***************************
Raymond Woo
e-mail: raywoo|at|gmail.com
http://gromit.stanford.edu/ray