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German AIP-VFR, free online access coming in 2023

50 Posts

14-Jul-22 07:43

Frans wrote:

“Since the VFR manual you mentioned is available freely online, it would be a lot of investment to automate its integration and updating into SkyDemon just to save people visiting their website. Perhaps the publishers will consider using the Eurocontrol PAMS database to host it in the future, at which point we could integrate it”
and

“We integrate certain third-party products where we have a contractual relationship with the author and, and make a small margin on the cost price of those products in order to cover our costs for maintaining them and georeferencing the documents. Offering a free product, outside of a contract, is a very different business proposition. It isn’t something we have done before.”

Frankly, I don’t really get Tim’s argument. Regardless of the “cost” of the AIP that both the user and SkyDemon would have to pay to the issuing party, Tim could offer that AIP integrated in SkyDemon at a premium. Meaning, if the German AIP costs say 60 EUR, SkyDemon could sell it for 60 EUR + X to cover for the cost of implementing it (as it is done today). If the German AIP costs 0 EUR, SkyDemon could still offer the integrated AIP for X EUR. I think many people got used to having it all in one place and esp. geo-referenced. I would pay that premium, most likely.

Hungriger Wolf (EDHF), Germany

14-Jul-22 07:50

I think SD, like AR, get data from Eurocontrol via their B2B data link, and don’t want to be scraping it off various websites.

It will be the same with FF and GP.

The B2B interface isn’t free but I can’t remember how much it was.

Administrator

Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

14-Jul-22 08:59

Patrick wrote:

If the German AIP costs 0 EUR, SkyDemon could still offer the integrated AIP for X EUR.

Or it could bl**dy consider we pay a subscription for that?

ELLX

20-Jul-22 04:54

Patrick wrote:

Frankly, I don’t really get Tim’s argument.

I agree. What Tim is starting to do is forget that there are other forms of GPS navigation out there and if his argument is “we don’t want to do it because it’s a faff for us, better the user goes to a named AIP website” when others integrate it directly, then he will lose customers.

EDL*, Germany

03-Jan-23 09:01

Reportedly, the AIP VFR will become available (only) on dfs-ais.de, on 5/1. But it will be a “low-tech” version, i.e. just single png files, not bunch-downloadable, not searchable, etc. Nothing on EAD. Hence, in order to get neat integration into Skydemon, etc., one will still have to pay, as Skydemon will still have to pay DFS/Eisenschmidt.

Note to self: check on 5/1 whether the freely available AIP VFR is complete, at the least.

Last Edited by boscomantico at 03 Jan 09:02

Mainz (EDFZ) & Egelsbach (EDFE), Germany

03-Jan-23 09:19

But it will be a “low-tech” version, i.e. just single png files, not bunch-downloadable, not searchable, etc

That’s unbelievable.

A serious question, not a comment: Why?

Whose business are they protecting? There is ample evidence that national CAAs have done a – post Australia – secret deal to protect Jeppesen’s IFR terminal chart business.

It takes a lot of effort to set this up. The primary data is probably in Word docs (or more properly in some document management system). Then they will have a batch process (a cron job, etc) to generate PDFs. But with this they need to run another job to either generate images, or more likely print the PDFs to images. And they will need way more storage for images than for PDFs.

FWIW anything you can view in a browser is batch-downloadable – if you find someone to write a web scraping script for it. But nobody will do this openly because the source material will be the DFS website which is not only copyrighted but also behind a paywall. There are plenty of web scrapers which do this sort of thing but the owner has to be careful who they let use it, which defeats the point.