The only approach that would make sense would be to use the Avioportolano data and airfield codes. I will talk to Guido Medici on the next occasion and see if we can do something here.
I have some data (coordinates, altitude, mostly runway and AFIS frequency – if any) for a great many fields in Italy.
But I cannot vow for it being correct, let alone complete. A good deal of it was collected from the www with no verification ever. And even if it was correct at one time, there’s no way to be sure it is correct right now. That is the hard part with this kind of information.
Still, I will gladly share it as a csv file or such.
But wouldn’t it be more effective to use the downloads from www.ourairports.com? At least there is some maintenance being done on that dataset.
Thank you very much Tom. By the looks of things, I will have a different destination now, so will probably not get to file this. Interesting though.
Re the airfields database, as soon as I have time, we might want to make a joint effort there to insert the missing airfields for Italy. We are talking roughly about 250 unlicensed airfields…
Cheers,
Phil
@airways: very strong words, but very little hard facts. Why should this be a “hack” or otherwise “immoral”?
The LOMRO VEKEN DCT is explicitly mentioned in LO1A as allowed DCT. It is there because someone deliberately put it there. Someone who very likely thought about it.
@airways, your employer should either make sure restrictions are accurately implemented in IFPS, or pressure your “croissant” vendor to fix their bugs. Procuring bad software and then swear at your customers even though they fly according to published rules sounds quite unprofessional and uncooperative to me.
@boscomantico the easiest way to do it would be if you could open a ticket, add the airfield coordinates, name and elevation, so we can add it to the database. Or if you have many airfields missing electronically, we can think about some bulk import.
And if I may add another question, concerning autorouter: how can I create routes / flightplans for airfields that don’t have ICAO codes? There don’t seem to any of those in the database and Italy is full of them…
Does this mean that the country in question (sorry I have no idea where a croissant comes from 
) sends one set of rules to IFPS and runs a different set of rules internally?
And it rejects flight plans distributed to it from IFPS, using unpublished rules?
That’s exactly what the UK does and it causes lots of problems.
But at least the UK publishes a standard route document (SRD), although they do not publish the rules operated by London Control for deciding which IFPS flight plans to accept.
I am not the author of the autorouter but it tends to use RNAV waypoints rather than DCTs. It can’t in any case use DCTs if they exceed the DCT MAX limit of the airspace in question.
It would be good to know what exactly are the ATC computer/IT issues in this case.
In the case of the UK it is almost impossible to find out because UK ATCOs won’t discuss it. Even privately they almost never discuss what is really going on. For example I have never managed to find out the criteria for rejecting IFPS flight plans. In extreme cases it’s obvious (e.g. filing one at 2000ft, in Class G) but there are many cases which are not obvious.
The whole IFR system in Europe is broken. It used to work “ok” when the national ATC services (who knew the inside tricks) offered free route development services but these have been gradually shut down. I think Germany still does it, but it won’t be for much longer I am sure because the salary bill is huge, and it’s used almost entirely by GA, most of which pays no route charges. The airlines do their own thing and anyway the upper airways are fairly straight so there aren’t many major issues like lower level GA faces.
Our system (developed in a country that also invented the croissant) is very rigid. If the route is not EXACTLY what it should be according to the agreed procedures with neighbouring centres then it will either send out wrong coordinations with the next (wrong) sector or simply not allow the flightplan into the database at all. The autorouter DCT-hack is a total nightmare. Very time-absorbing. The last time I had one like that there was not a single known RNAV point inside our airspace, still it was supposed to cross the Brussels FIR. The only thing I could do was mentally draw a line from ADEP to ADES and figure out myself an appropriate route. That way I can at least negotiate a clearance with the neighbours. Fun stuff…when you have the time.
The crap IFPS lets pass is often unworkable for some ATC computer systems. So yes, you might have some discussions enroute.
In what form are the ATC computer limitations?
The feeling I sometimes get is that I may have filed route X but ATC have a preferred route which may not be published as such (I guess KOK DCT LNO on a good day, or KOK … various waypoints … LNO on a bad day, might be one example) so you get that rather than the filed route.
Ultimately it is up to the countries that feed IFPS who are responsible for this. Eurocontrol just sits there and pays a load of unix hackers to write millions of lines of code to implement the various rules which are supplied to it
Achim+Tom’s router routes according to these rules. Previous tools (since 2008, the long gone Autoplan for which I did extensive beta testing, and the still working FlightPlanPro) contained large numbers of preferred routes which would be incorporated as the complaints flooded in. That’s not a good way to do it.
The crap IFPS lets pass is often unworkable for some ATC computer systems. So yes, you might have some discussions enroute.
I see. But I guess if the Eurocontrol Computer validates it – it should be ok. No?
