Peter wrote:
I also realise Germany (and others?) does not publish its VFR AIP for free.
Croatia publishes VFR AIP for free.
Most of Europe publishes the VFR AIP for free.
Is there an easy way to get a URL to the AIP for a given airport ICAO code?
Is there an easy way to get a URL to the AIP PDF for a given airport ICAO code?
This is for the EuroGA Airports Database.
I realise one could set up a login to EAD and scrape it out of there, but it probably breaks their terms and conditions, and the traffic may get noticed and cause a blacklist of that client machine.
I also realise Germany (and others?) does not publish its VFR AIP for free.
[ posts merged in from another thread ]
Via the different CAA websites, I would say no ie the date of the cycle is in the url.
Yes indeed; the URL will change at each AIRAC cycle.
Quite why there isn’t a “latest AIP for XXXX” URL, is a good question…
I have had a look at EAD but I am not sure there is a way to get the AIP for a specific ICAO code.
Is it not available via auto router? Briefing /aip/plates?
Sure, but I can hardly use the AR to deliver AIPs for the EuroGA airport database
EAD does have the stuff but not by ICAO code. AFAICT you have to download a whole country and then you pick your way through the PDFs to get the one you want.
Probably, for each country, at each date, there is a mechanic way to get the URL to the AIP for a given airport ICAO code. But different for each country, and the URL may change depending on the current date. E.g., where
Belgium & Luxembourg all aerodromes: https://ops.skeyes.be/html/belgocontrol_static/eaip/eAIP_Main/html/eAIP/EB-AD-2.${ICAO_CODE}-en-GB.html
France IFR: https://www.sia.aviation-civile.gouv.fr/dvd/${AIRAC_DATE_DD_MMM_YYY}/FRANCE/AIRAC-${AIRAC_DATE_ISO}/html/eAIP/FR-AD-2.${ICAO_CODE}-fr-FR.html
France VFR: https://www.sia.aviation-civile.gouv.fr/dvd/eAIP_${AIRAC_DATE_DD_MMM_YYY}/Atlas-VAC/PDF_AIPparSSection/VAC/AD/AD-2.${ICAO_CODE}.pdf
Aerodromes that have both IFR & VFR will be available at both URLs, with the respective informations.
Czech Republic IFR: damn, no single predictable URL that I can find immediately, but still, you can do stuff. There is a collection of URLs of the form https://aim.rlp.cz/ais_data/aip/data/valid/a2-${ICAO_CODE:2}-${FOO}.pdf but the list of valid values for ${FOO} is not predictable. However, you can look into https://aim.rlp.cz/ais_data/aip/control/aip_obsah_en.htm to collect all valid FOOs. A regular expression on the raw HTML should give good results, something like match lines with '.*id="(a2-${ICAO_CODE:2}-[^"]+)".*'
, remove non-matching lines, replace matching lines with '\1'
. Full sed script: sed -E -e '/id="(a2-${ICAO_CODE:2}-[^"]+)"/!d' -e 's/.*id="(a2-${ICAO_CODE:2}-[^"]+)".*/\1/'
Czech Republic VFR: https://aim.rlp.cz/vfrmanual/actual/${ICAO_CODE}_text_en.html
United Kingdom (and non-UK areas under responsibility, such as Channel Islands, Isle of Man and maybe others I forget about): https://www.aurora.nats.co.uk/htmlAIP/Publications/${AIRAC_DATE_ISO}-AIRAC/html/eAIP/EG-AD-2.${ICAO_CODE}-en-GB.html
Basically, you have to do the work country by country, but then “it works”. If I’m allowed a reasonable programming language that I know (probably not PHP…) or “arbitrary common Linux/UNIX command-line environment” (sed, awk, bash, wget/curl, …), I would probably write the code that spits out the URL collection (not a single URL because of the Czech case) per aerodrome if you want.
To avoid any blacklisting, I would generate the URLs (with the necessary scraping) e.g. once per day at most, and cache the result, or stick it in some database or something like that.
I think a source for AIP PDFs has been discovered… watch this space.
Indeed. A “stream” of latest pireps would be nice. eddh.de has it. SD does not, unfortunately.