Airport Name versus City Name?

Ultranomad wrote:

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

Agree, I think that’s what is used for most (all?) airports. It’s New York Kennedy, Milan Bresso (to change size a bit… ), Paris Orly, Wien Schwechat, Chicago O’Hare, Windhoek Eros (yep, that’s the name!), Nairobi Wilson, etc, etc.

Admittedly Ryanair are taking this naming convention to some extremes (Frankfurt Hahn, anyone?), but that’s prob99 not relevant here.

Peter wrote:

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

I very much understand the problem, Peter. The German AIP VFR shows it as “Leer-Papenburg”, but as you said, that is from a (not freely accessible) PDF, so there’s no way to gather that data non-manually. Very annoying.

FWIW, I don’t think this is a major issue.

Skyvector got it right https://skyvector.com/airport/EDWF/Leer-Papenburg-Airport, so there must be some database that has this…

Isn’t it strange that when someone tries to do something positive there is always someone sniping in the background? I suppose if nobody did anything positive there would be nothing for them to criticise but the same people might then say “someone should do something”.
I for one would like to say a big WELL DONE to all those who have contributed to the making of the database.
As for the naming of airfields/airports in France I think like @Medewok has written for Germany we are pretty relaxed about it and for most cases one is led by ATC. In over 25 years of flying, here I have only had one instance where the naming of an airfield was a problem. My instructor had told me to go to Couhé Verac (LFDV) pronounced like Quiverac to meet my examiner for the PPL flight test.
I looked everywhere for Quiverac before finally going back to the instructor and asking him to show me the airfield on the map.
Since then ( I use the charts freely available on the VAC & eAIP app) I use the name top right first and top left second (if needed).
WELL DONE again guys and remember “those who can, do, those who can’t, criticise.”

Peter wrote:

We have achieved theoretical perfection, by swapping them over, and clearly this is what every other database is doing too.

Basically, the “airport name” is a bit of a joke (except when it is actually used)

Fully agree. The “airport name” is actually pretty hard to define, as most airports have several: City name, name of the nearest suburb, name of whomever the airport was trying to honour by giving it their name, IATA code, ICAO code…

To stick with the example of Leer,

• the official full name is “Flugplatz Leer-Papenburg”
• the nearest suburb is called Nüttermoor, and that is indeed the name one hears most often among the local, non-pilot population. It doesn’t appear on any chart an no non-local pilot will know this
• in this case, the airport was not named after some local bigwig. In other cases in Germany, e.g. Hamburg has “Helmut Schmidt Airport” or Cologne has “Konrad Adenauer Airport” etc. These nicknames are usually irrelevant for pilots, until they aren’t (Charles de Gaulle, JFK etc.)
• the airport has no IATA code (no scheduled services)
• ICAO is EDWF

In conclusion, “airport name” can mean many things, but in most cases on the EuroGA database, any name variant will suffice to identify the airport in question, so no need to make a fuzz.

You could use the EAD to get official names

Peter wrote:

Basically, the “airport name” is a bit of a joke (except when it is actually used)

Agree except, of course, for large cities with several/many airfields like London, Paris, etc where the airport name is required qualification.

Even Autorouter has difficulty with this. I’ve come to the point of only searching on the ICAO code. Enter “Paris” as a departure or destination, and Autorouter lists all the Paris airports for selection. But enter Ajaccio or Bastia and one comes up blank (for Ajaccio which is “Napoleon Bonaparte”) or worse (for Bastia which is “Poretta” Autorouter returns LESB San Se*bastia*n).

I agree that the safest approach is to list the normally associated city/town first as Jepp does at top right and then the airport name which Jepp lists under the ICAO code.