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Airport Name versus City Name?

On another forum, mainland Europe, the EuroGA airport database was discussed. A particular criticism was around the airport name of Le Touquet being “wrong”. Is is “Cote D’Opale” or “Le Touquet”?

Well, all “regulars” know it is the latter.

But… wot about this one, which is clearly the other way round

We could ask a French pilot, one who has actually been to all French airports, to go through all the French airports we have in the database (1000?) and advise us on the correct order of the two names, but I don’t think anyone will want to do that In practice, someone could do this for those who get a lot of GA traffic, but somebody will always find one which is wrong. So, we now display both names (or just one if both are the same as with e.g. Sion)

Is there a hard rule in the French AIP that the first name shown is what the airport is called? Such a rule is very obviously not applied in Jeppesen data. As regards the “station name” used in a radio call, that appears to be what is shown next to the frequency.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

At capzlog.aero we have a database with airports, including their names and the city they are in, so if you provide me with a list, I can give you our equivalents. The problem is that our database is also only 80-90% accurate as the sources we use have the exact same issue – everyone writes whatever they want and even two people in the same organization (e.g. FOCA/BAZL) do things differently because of lack of well defined processes.

LSZH, LSZF, Switzerland

Do we have EHSE yet? Breda Int, Hoeven, Seppe, Roosendal Vliegclub, Bosschenhoofd

Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

We already have > 15k airports in there – basically everything which existed “on the internet”. From the FAQ:

I could have put in the Italian “avioportolano”, perhaps another 500, but their density in Italy is so high that we would need to implement map layers. Actually that is an interesting observation on GA in itself!

Frankly I don’t really want to import yet another database It is really quite obvious that practically every “GA database” out there lifts data from all the others. Then somebody who has a lot of time fixes up any errors in the common watering holes which is all the airports within x00nm radius of the fixer’s house. This process terminates when the fixer runs out of time. Well, just like most open source software David (of EuroGA) did a huge database ~20 years ago, collected from various sources, and he still had a copy which we imported where it differed from what we had already.

At this point I would like views on the current presentation of the airport name / city name stuff.

EHSE is here but there are no pilot reports yet.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

EHSE is here but there are no pilot reports yet.

That is on me, will fill that out !

Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Is there a hard rule in the French AIP that the first name shown is what the airport is called?

The way I understand it is that in the French VAC, the BOLD NAME is the one to use on the radio as the name for the aerodrome.
Eg for my own airfield VAC PLATE local copy it is called LESPARRE SAINT LAURENT MEDOC and this is what you should call on the radio.

Jepp is not the official AIP for France…

Regards, SD..

Last Edited by skydriller at 11 Aug 13:40

That’s interesting; thanks.

I wonder if every country’s AIP does the same?

Well, yes, Jepp is not an “AIP” at all. Jepp interpret the AIP data and produce their terminal charts, their Text Pages, etc. But Jepp sets the standard for airport databases and the naming of airports. I suspect all airport databases out on the internet start off with Jepp data, and then over the years various people added in the smaller places, the farm strips, the UL strips, etc.

In Europe, the “AIP” is what one gets from Eurocontrol/EAD, and if our airport database provides the appropriate links, that should do the job. Frankly I severely doubt any pilot who is actually flying a plane (rather than trying to wind somebody up on the internet ) will not know what name to use on the radio. After all, he/she will be in possession of the terminal chart(s) – even if it is just the VFR approach chart and the airport diagram.

Would I be right in assuming that showing both the airport name and the city name will in all cases deliver the correct radio station name?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

EDWF is wrongly labelled as “Papenburg” in the database. Papenburg is not a suburb of Leer (as is otherwise common in naming airports), but rather a separate city which co-finances the airport. The proper name is “Leer-Papenburg”, its R/T callsign is “Leer Info”.

Low-hours pilot
EDVM Hildesheim, Germany

We show it as Papenburg / Leer.

It is certainly true that if you search on the exact code you get this which shows just Papenburg for the upper result, and I am getting that fixed

and this is how the “most widely used database” shows it

I don’t know how or where from it might be possible to generate “Leer-Papenburg”. There is no practical way to extract airport names from the terminal charts in EAD; “scraping” PDFs, especially nationally generated ones which are all made by different PDF tools, is not viable.

Well, there may be an argument for reversing our current “airport name / city name” listing and show it as “city name / airport name” but that will be clearly wrong in many cases.

But it is probably “less wrong”, so I have asked for that change

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Well, there may be an argument for reversing our current “airport name / city name” listing and show it as “city name / airport name” but that will be clearly wrong in many cases.

But it is probably “less wrong”, so I have asked for that change

“City name / airport name” is also correct in cases where both names are used, as in “Lyon Bron” or “London Gatwick”.

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic
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