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ICAO GIS map viewer

Just found an interesting map viewer in the ICAO domain. The layer structure is somewhat shambolic, I must say, but it can certainly be put to good use. For instance, it can generate reasonably usable VFR charts. Make of it what you will.

Last Edited by Ultranomad at 01 Oct 23:37
LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

What an amazing and bizzare find!

It reminded me of those stories where Japanese soldiers got stuck in some remote regions and didn’t know for years that WW2 had ended, and continued to produce aviation charts

I guess this is to be expected of ICAO. When GPS caused the bottom to fall out of the navigation market, they invented PRNAV and that will keep everybody employed for the next 30 years

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter, in all fairness, three out of four airfields you mention are marked on the map as closed, and it’s not even ICAO that supplied the data, it’s apparently ourairports.com.
I looked up a few locations in Czech Republic, Russia, Thailand, Israel and Cuba, and it showed quite a few obscure airfields, which do exist (some of them in actual use by GA), but have no ICAO code and are not indicated on official maps. No ultralight-only or agricultural strips, though. If you tick appropriate layers, you also get current (or at least less than 1 year old) airspace boundaries and IFR routes. Obviously, this is of little use here in W Europe, but may be quite useful in less civilised parts of the world, e.g. in the recent case of Senegal and Mauritania.

By the way, if you click on the airfield icon, you’ll get a pop-up panel with some details, occasionally even a relevant web link.

Last Edited by Ultranomad at 02 Oct 13:18
LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

Regarding ourairports: I am spending a good deal of effort to get it aligned with other sources of aerodrome information – openstreetmap for one – but it is a huge job and it will never be entirely done.

As for the ICAO map:

  • is this really from icao themselves? It does look very amateurish indeed, to come from such a solid respected professional organisation. Either poorly coded or running on poor hardware, too, to judge by the (lack of) speed. One option is even marked “wait 10 seconds” !
  • unless I missed it, there’s no way (yet?) to see the various bits of airspace, TMA’s, CTR’s, danger zones and what not? That is my first requirement on VFR charts.

But of course only gratitude to the messenger !
And it seems clear the tool will either be improved soon or quickly forgotten.

EBZH Kiewit, Belgium

Bits of airspace are there, they are called BDRYLP2016 CLASS or BDRYHL2016 CLASS. Since it took me a while to find them, I thought I should share.

Last Edited by AlexG at 02 Oct 15:03
LFPL, France

@Jan_Olieslagers, they are all in separate layers:

  • Lower airspace classes are in the ICAO FIR layer, BDRYLP2016 or BDRYLP2016 CLASS sublayer (the latter one introduces colour coding for different classes)
  • Upper airspace classes are in the ICAO FIR layer, BDRYHP2016 or BDRYHP2016 CLASS sublayer (the latter one introduces colour coding for different classes)
  • Lower SUAs (prohibited/restricted/segregated/danger/etc.) are in the ICAO AERODROME layer, SUASLP 2016 sublayer
  • Upper SUAs (prohibited/restricted/segregated/danger/etc.) are in the ICAO AERODROME layer, SUASHP 2016 sublayer
  • Navaids are in the ICAO AERODROME layer, NAVH 2016 sublayer
  • All of the above are also present in the sublayers of the ICAO ROUTE layer, some in a slightly different presentation; you also find IFR routes there
  • Runway outlines of medium and large aerodromes are in the ICAO AERODROME layer, Runway 2016 sublayer
  • ICAO 5-letter point designators are in the ICAO 5LNC layer and in the ICAO ROUTE layer (but I suspect the latter one only contains route-associated ones).

That’s what I meant when I said the structure was somewhat shambolic… but judging by the layer names, the data must be fresh.

is this really from icao themselves? It does look very amateurish indeed, to come from such a solid respected professional organisation. Either poorly coded or running on poor hardware, too, to judge by the (lack of) speed. One option is even marked “wait 10 seconds” !

I suspect it’s managed by ICAO but their server may be pulling data from a handful of other GIS on the fly, hence the delay and the abundance of similar yet distinct presentation options.

Last Edited by Ultranomad at 02 Oct 15:18
LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

Updates for those who have not noticed yet:

Two layers, ICAO ROUTE and ICAO 5LNC, contain largely the same information, but in different presentations, try playing with the sublayers.

The Basemaps menu in the upper right corner contains a huge variety of base map layers to suit different tastes.

The search box on top searches for place names worldwide – not just aerodromes.

Printing does not seem to work – on four attempts with different settings, all I got was ‘Error, try again’. If anyone convinces it to produce printouts, please tell how you did it!

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

I don’t think there is any free lunch in the mapping business.

You can get

  • bare data for Europe (because everybody is trying to make money out of chart copyright)
  • good data for the USA (because they make it available)
  • some “OK stuff” for the rest of the world where it may well be useful because down there nobody cares what people do so long as they don’t p1ss off somebody big (flying below the radar when necessary)

Topo data exists for everywhere; some of it with interesting origins such as the USSR. The Oziexplorer community has terabytes of this stuff, so finding moving-map data for say Africa is easy. But airspace data for Europe does not exist in a machine readable form, following the closure of DAFIF c. 2005.

Thanks for discovering this, Ultranomad

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Ultranomad wrote:

Printing does not seem to work – on four attempts with different settings, all I got was ‘Error, try again’. If anyone convinces it to produce printouts, please tell how you did it!

No problem at all! In the sidebar, scroll down to ‘print’, then select your paper size and orientation and hit the ‘print’ button. You then get an animated progress bar that takes a while and creates the printable file. Once this is done, the progress bar changes to the file name. Click that and it downloads and opens as (in my case) a PDF. Done.

FYI: Mac OS 10.11.6, FireFox 49.0.1.

As an aside, this really shows some very obscure airfields! In southern Spain, for example, it even has some firefighting and crop dusting strips.

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