How is it possible, that airspace data is not publicly available? Considering the amount of drone pilots out there for example, there should definitely be an open API of airspace data (AIXM, including airspaces, supplements, notams, ...). Could EASA maybe do something? The current situation is dangerous for the whole aviation industry.

Peter Holt
Peter Holt

Parts of your list do exist in a machine readable form.

For example most (not all) national AIPs can be found at Eurocontrol EAD. They are as PDFs, so not "machine readable" unless you develop custom scripts to parse the PDFs, and anyway you can't get it in bulk unless you pay for the B2B interface.

Airspace is, I believe, now available. Don't know what form.

Notams are available also from Eurocontrol but not reliably. For example for some airports in Europe you can get them not from EAD but from NOAA. Similar situation for tafs and metars but much better.

Juha Lindstedt
Juha Lindstedt

In practice, the data is NOT machine-readable, in fact nowhere near. I've studied the subject quite a lot developing Aviamaps (https://aviamaps.com). In Finland luckily supplements have AIXM files as attachments, but what comes to fetching NOTAMs the system need to enter airport codes one by one with few second delay to EAD Basic in multiple parts, which is really slow even for one country. Fetching all Eurocontrol countries would be a nightmare. For starters you'd need a list of all the airports first which I believe is not available either.

And reading PDFs is near to impossible, I've tried it.

Oh, and NOTAMs in EAD Basic does not contain all data, for example geographical location is missing, which is quite important in my opinion.

There's no excuse for the current situation, which is dangerous for the whole industry.

Juha Lindstedt
Juha Lindstedt

Not to mention there's areas in PDF that say after a coordinate follow border or follow a road, but there's no such coordinates given. Luckily in Finland there's only country borders to follow, which is relatively easy to figure out, but what comes to roads that's also near to impossible.

Airspace documents are not meant for either computers or humans. I'd argue very few people actually know where to fly and where not based on current state of AIPs out there, given the airspace is nowadays more dynamic than ever.

John FRANKLIN
John FRANKLIN

I would love to have a magic solution to this challenge. At the moment the situation is a national level competence so not as easy to resolve as we would hope or think as aviators. There are discussions at the next EASA Stakeholder Meetings to discuss how to improve the situation. We will keep you updated on progress through the Community Site.


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