I'm buying your sectionals for a year.

In rec.aviation.student Kyler Laird wrote:
I learned that the FAA is now selling scanned sectional chart DVDs.
....
I've wanted the data for a long time too, so I decided to get it and
make it available to everyone.
http://aviationtoolbox.org/raw_data/FAA_sectionals/

*boggle* I'm not sure which is more shocking - that the FAA would sell
scanned sectionals at all or that somebody would put them up for free
download. THANK YOU!

If you are at all worried about the bandwidth, you might want to set
up BitTorrent on your server: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

Regards,
Boris

Borislav Deianov writes:

*boggle* I'm not sure which is more shocking - that the FAA would sell
scanned sectionals at all or that somebody would put them up for free
download.

Neither should be shocking. Both should be *expected*. We (taxpayers)
pay for this data collection, right?

THANK YOU!

You're welcome. I'll be thrilled if people find it useful.

BTW, I decided to finally move the ATA-100 data and my old (ug, Perl)
interface over to the same server.
http://aviationtoolbox.org/old/ATA-100/
I find that data to be almost as interesting as the sectionals but I
think it's really going to get interesting when they're combined.

If you are at all worried about the bandwidth, you might want to set
up BitTorrent on your server: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

Thank you for the suggestion. BitTorrent is great and, of course,
anyone is welcome to inject this data into it, but I hope some thought
will go into some sort of versioning so that updates will easily
propagate. It shouldn't be necessary though. I got this server with
the intent of serving up useful stuff like this without worrying about
bandwidth usage (as I do with my other colo).

plug
This one is hosted at FDC Servers.
http://www.fdcservers.net/dedicated.html
The bandwidth is "unmetered." If it does bog down, I'll try to upgrade
to a faster plan.
/plug

Seriously...enjoy! No worries.

--kyler

Kyler Laird writes:

*boggle* I'm not sure which is more shocking - that the FAA would sell
scanned sectionals at all or that somebody would put them up for free
download.

Neither should be shocking. Both should be *expected*. We (taxpayers)
pay for this data collection, right?

We taxpayers in the rest of the world also pay for our governments'
geodata collection, but we see precious little of the result unless we
pay a lot of money. I know that we non-Americans don't always have
nice things to say about your country, but I think this is one area
where the U.S. is decades ahead of the rest of the world.

For example, my handrolled Canadian GPS airport and navaid database
comes from U.S. DAFIF data, since the U.S. publishes *far* more free
data for Canada than the Canadian government does. The new 3
arcsecond SRTM elevation data coming out is more than adequate for a
real-life, worldwide aviation terrain-avoidance system (or will be,
once it's all been checked), and the U.S. government is also releasing
it for free. I could go on and on, but I try not to gush online.


All the best,


David