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Free online VFR charts for Europe

I can’t see anything there, with Firefox. I have accidentally found I can draw a route, but there is no map.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter, it’s because it tries to show your location determined from IP, and it’s outside France. Try entering any LFxx ICAO code in a box in the top right corner. You can also overlay other maps – it even shows which airfields have restaurants (tick “Restos” on the right)

Last Edited by Ultranomad at 13 Mar 18:40
LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

This is nice!

How long before somebody screenshots the whole of France, automatically scripted of course, combines the tiles into a TIFF, and then I can calibrate them for Oziexplorer

Last Edited by Peter at 13 Mar 19:04
Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter, that’s probably easier than I thought. What do you think will be the legal issues if I download the map, make it one image and publish it so that everyone can have it?

LSZH, LSZF, Switzerland

France has an online chart here

It apparently tries to use your IP to position you on the chart, so to see the chart you need to enter e.g. a French airport ICAO code in the box in the top right, and when the matching name appears, click on that.

Last Edited by Peter at 13 Mar 20:59
Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

No idea. Are there terms and conditions which somebody can translate? There are sure to be restrictions on commercial use.

I am starting a new thread on these french maps here.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

You can also reach the map by opening the link, clicking on the big “infos” at the top left and then dragging around (for me in Switzerland I have to drag from the left to right to see the map)

LSZH, LSZF, Switzerland

One more pleasant surprise – this time a crowdsourced product: maps.openaip.net.

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

The map tiles on this site are not protected in any way, you can just get them via HTTP.

I have created a PHP script which downloads all tiles from the DFS page and assembles them to a map. I haven’t updated it to the new site because I thought the option to display the ICAO map was gone but it is all still there. The same technique can also be applied to the French site. I see no issue doing that for my own purposes but I would not redistribute the resulting image due to copyright. If they get you, you pay number of download * cost of map + fine.

Presumably, therefore, there isn’t anything illegal in the means of capturing the map being available, so that each person can capture their own.

This is exactly the same issue with using MOBAC (Mobile Atlas Creator) to produce your own maps. I have very successfully used it to produce topo maps of the Alps, and general driving maps for my Nokia (though the map apps on that had their own problems). Some map site owners threatened to sue MOBAC’s developers who chose to not fight it, and versions past 1.8 have most sources removed (I have 1.8 if anybody needs it) but instead the 1.9+ program can run external scripts and that is how MOBAC continues. It works great for producing Oziexplorer files, which is a good way to generate your own aviation (VFR) moving maps. But thus far there aren’t many “public” aviation map sources – only DFS and this French one, that I know about. I know some UK pilots produced Oziexplorer versions of the UK maps, by screenshotting the Memory Map images and joining them up, but those are not on any website; you can buy the product and produce the Ozi version for your own use.

A lot of the map sources block MOBAC (they can probably tell from the speed and sequence of tile retrieval) so that any script needs to have long gaps between tile downloads.

Last Edited by Peter at 14 Mar 07:56
Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom
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