Hmm, that is interesting. First I did this with Safari and this morning on the second time clicking on the first URL I got the PDF. It didn’t yesterday, I was able to click many times on the URL and was presented with the login page. Now, on Chrome it shows almost the same habit; first click went to the login page, second time it presents me the PDF. Extra info: Chrome in incognito mode.
Try it without the incognito mode.
I think this points to something…
Has anyone else tried it? I think the first time you click on one of the URLs presented, you get that EAD page, but if you refresh then you get the PDF.
EAD seems to use a stored cookie, and obviously the incognito mode blocks that. That breaks a lot of websites…
sorry, i had already an EAD account and encountered the same problem.
Hi Peter,
I had the same behavior you described when I tried yesterday with Firefox in normal mode (first time sent to login page, afterwards getting the PDF).
I’m going to try on a different computer with another browser
PS I don’t think I have an EAD account
@somolli @CCO709 @chflyer @WingsWaterAndWheels posts moved to this airport database thread.
We have done some digging on this 
EAD sets a session cookie, which persists all the time the browser is open. When you close the browser totally (all tabs, etc), or if you use incognito mode, you lose this cookie.
So you will get the EAD login page, just once, and do a refresh on that, you should get the PDF, and you should not see the login page again. You don’t actually need an EAD login, although it is a free registration…
There are other solutions but they are not so great e.g. caching the PDFs locally, which could result in the site delivering an out of date PDF, which in aviation is obviously not a good idea – even though there are aviation data sources which do exactly that. If we have to do this we will do it; it’s not a big deal.
Peter wrote:
I think the first time you click on one of the URLs presented, you get that EAD page, but if you refresh then you get the PDF.
This is exactly what I had on Tuesday
Same thing on another computer using Microsoft Edge (don’t blame me, it’s intalled by default…). By the way I more or less randomly selected the airports I used for the test, using 2 different ones.
Hope this helps!
Yes I can reproduce it here also.
It means people can’t use “incognito” modes, the so-called “anti tracking” modes, or presumably also the TOR browser, to get AIP data – even directly from EAD. These modes are worthless anyway, frankly, due to all the other stuff which every browser sends up to the server anyway, but that’s another topic.
For some reason the EAD site programmers went to a lot of trouble to prevent somebody from (presumably) creating a copy of their whole site. And to prevent bookmarked URLs from working for long…
It is obviously possible to grab the whole EAD site – because anything which a human can get in a browser can be automated – and indeed I know somebody who did exactly that, some years ago. The total size was about 25GB back then. It was a “proof of concept” exercise, written entirely in C++
Well, I guess Eurocontrol is trying to raise revenue by charging some €€€ for their B2B access.
The next enhancement will be auto updating a thread on the forum. That is more complicated because it needs some coding on the EuroGA end of things. The airport database is on a totally separate server, so if somebody trashed it, they won’t get inside the forum.
I wonder if there is any interest in a daily email digest of any new reports? It would be emailed say 3am each day, just listing new entries.
A thread pointing to every new report is too much IMO. Same for the daily email. I would unsubscribe to this.
A thread with weekly list of new reports is enough.
