In a previous article, "Marco Leon" mleon(at)optonline.net said:
Thanks Paul. Can you elaborate on your source of "FAA data?" And what does
DAFIF stand for? Sounds like a nice source for some techie aviation data...

I get a CD from the FAA every 56 days with all the current data on it.
Information on how to order it is buried very deep on the FAA web site,
but I think if you look for "ATA-100" you'll eventually find it. Or if
you don't want to pay for it, contact me via email and I'll tell you where
to ftp it for free.

DAFIF is the Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File, which comes
from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, a US military agency. It's
free, and it's available for ftp every 28 days (Start at
http://www.nima.mil and look under "Products and Services" for
Aeronautical and from there to the "Aeronautical Information Home Page").
It covers the entire world, but not in great detail - they don't worry
about airports that they can't land an A-10 at.

Both sets of information obviously come from old mainframes, and it's a
bitch to parse, and they're none too careful about being consistent.

Basically if all you're worried about is the US, the FAA data is better.
If you're worried about the rest of the world, the DAFIF data is your only
option, unless you're like me and have a cadre of people typing in
information and making it available for your database generators.

Actually, depending on your needs, your best option might be be to use
gpsbabel to convert data from my GPX waypoint generator to whatever format
you need, because then you get to take advantage of all the work I put
into converting and maintaining my data. http://navaid.com/GPX/


--
Paul Tomblin http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
The people here have other bones to pick -- possibly including yours.
-- Mike Andrews