Creating a basic airport database (merged)

wleferrand wrote:

would it be easier for someone to take a trip if they were joining a group of 2-3 aircraft instead of going somewhere by themselves? (or is it going to be too intimidating?)

I would say more interesting (more purpose and more fun) but more difficult to schedule (several planning to match)

wleferrand wrote:

on longer, multi days trips, would the decision to go a bit easier if there were someone taking care of transporting the luggage, etc, and waiting the pilots at the destination to make sure that parking / car rental goes smoothly? Eg. I’ve an aztec, I could load everyone’s luggage to alleviate w&b concerns

You mean a kind of free trip facilitator ? It would sure be appreciated.

wleferrand wrote:

what % of people don’t fly enough because they can’t take a weekend off family and thus would fly more if they could easily participate to family-friendly trips?

People need a solid case to give their family the will to ride along. The uncertainty of VFR travel is already a hassle, family-friendly destinations are key. Then “family-friendly” can mean different things to different people.

To sum it up :

• aircraft owners are alone except of forums like this one
• club renters who want to travel are often alone in their clubs (if I asked for advice about an international travel in my club, almost nobody could help me, and most would deter me)

So we need a structure able to gather all kinds of pilots willing to travel, and willing to show their family GA is a great vacation style
That being said, the objective should still be to make pilots able to take those trips alone with their family, without the group (i’m sure that’s what you thought).

Peter wrote:

A database would be a big timesaver. (…) I think most people would not fully trust it, and continue to use the AIP.

I would trust it far more if there would be explicit information freshness management. Only a clear labelling of “up to what AIP revision the information has been synchronised and checked” and some colour coding to indicate whether that is the latest (since the schedule is internationally known in advance and synchronised, this should be easy). It then takes only one person per airfield to check each revision (or even better, revision preview) and update the label as long as nothing changes. I would probably volunteer to do that for my homebase, if the database is under some kind of free-as-in-free-speech licence.

Add a direct deep link to the AIP, and you’re set.

One issue is that the AIPs don’t, AFAIK, contain a change log. So somebody has to see if anything has changed.

But this project would be just the basic airport features, like opening hours, customs/immigration, avgas… with an option for people to add free format comments. Is that about right?

Peter wrote:

One issue is that the AIPs don’t, AFAIK, contain a change log.

Each paper/PDF AIP revision contains the list of changed pages since previous revision, and a “checklist” that lists each page and its last revision date. On the pages themselves, the changed lines (since last revision) are highlighted by a vertical bar in the margin.

The eAIP HTML format contains a checkbox top right, with tooltip “Show amendments” which will show removed parts crossed out on dark purple background, and added parts on lighter purple background. Plus the entry page contains preview of the next cycle, and a PDF download with only the changed pages.

That’s great, because when I spoke to a guy who used to do a (now defunct) European flight planning product, he said he preferred the printed AIPs because he could open the current and the last and see where the changes were This was 5-10 years ago.

I might be missing something but when trying I got nothing… Type homebase – basemap Windy moves to align with my homebase that’s it.