Airport not listed ????

I would also like to have a new entry added - Melbourne (Australia) City Heliport - IATA code KAH. I have a number of photos at this location.

Also, can small airfields without an ICAO or IATA code be listed? I will be attending an airshow at such an airfield in March to commemorate the centenary of the first powered flight in Australia, by Harry Houdini, in 1910, and will have photos to upload.

Regards

Peter.

Hi there,

yes, there are some more in Germany which could be listed and some already closed military bases.

It would be nice to add them, like the way we can add a serial number!

Greetings Fritz

Also, can small airfields without an ICAO or IATA code be listed? I will be attending an airshow at such an airfield in March to commemorate the centenary of the first powered flight in Australia, by Harry Houdini, in 1910, and will have photos to upload.

Adding those airfields is not a problem by itself, but each airport must have a unique ID to properly identify them. Any suggestion on how are we going to ID those without ICAO or IATA codes? Just make up our own?

Ken

Hi there,

yes, there are some more in Germany which could be listed and some already closed military bases.

It would be nice to add them, like the way we can add a serial number!

Add an airport require a lot more information than adding an aircraft. I was not sure people are willing to do so. Looks like it's time to add it.

Ken

In my previous post I referred to IATA code KAH. Further investigation has revealed that this code refers to a heliport located in the suburbs of Melbourne, not the one where I have taken photos, and which is located in the heart of the city, across the river from the casino. This heliport is referred to as Yarra Bank heliport and has the ICAO code of YYBK. Refer to the following link for some info.

http://www.airportguide.com/airport/Australia/Yarra_Bank-YYBK/

Regards,

Peter

It may be of interest that a private individual created his own unique coding system for unidentified UK airfields. The listing is shown here

http://www.homepages.mcb.net/bones/06airfields/UK/uk.htm

The coding system is made up as follows.

The first digit is X as this is not used as a first digit by ICAO.

The second digit of the code is a number which broadly indicates the location of the airfield. Numbers 1 to 5 are allocated to airfields in England by Latitude (51N to 55N), 6 is used for Scotland, 7 for Wales and 8 for Northern Ireland. X9 codes are used primarily for private strips. X0 codes are slightly different, these being used for airfields that existed prior to WW2 only.

The last two digits are alphabetical with most showing two letters from the airfield name.

Examples of these codes are X4YR for York Rufforth (a disused WW2 airfield) and X0LH for the WW1 aerodrome at Larkhill.

I did begin to use this system but decided against without it being accepted by Airport-Data, but I note that it is in use by other contributors on this site.

I would like to see it adopted.

Malcolm.

It may be of interest that a private individual created his own unique coding system for unidentified UK airfields. The listing is shown here

http://www.homepages.mcb.net/bones/06airfields/UK/uk.htm

I visited this website before. This codeing system will solve the issue for UK airfields, but what about other countries? A more general system suitable for all countries would be ideal.

Ken

Further to my post of Jan 22, the airfield referred to where the airshow took place was Melton Victoria, and has the ICAO code of YMEL - Google ICAO YMEL for more details.

I had hoped that others may wish to contribute to this discussion in the hope that it would bring forward some kind of resolution. I do believe that there are problems with the consistency of data entered into the database by uploaders. Please understand however that my intentions should not be misconstrued; problems can be regarded as opportunities as they say.

The two areas that I feel may need some reconsideration are airfields and manufacturers.

It is a fact that manufacturers have allied companies, they may change name but there does appear to be a wide number of interpretations as to what is the manufacturer’s name.

Take Schleicher, for example, who primarily produce sail planes – sorry, gliders. There are at least 16 different entries. Now it could be argued that this may not matter as entering the single word name in the search field will collect all entries but unfortunately in two cases the name is incorrectly spelt. Aerospatiale is another example.

When entering a new registration into the database, the alternatives are shown, but how does one choose?

Why have these alternatives been ignored by those who have created a new manufacturer’s entry?

The ideal solution would be to limit entries to this field by a rejection of all but those shown but I am unsure as to the difficulties associated with this from a programming aspect.

Regarding airfields, the respective field is again ‘open’ that is to say that uploaders are free to enter anything they wish up to, I think, 10 characters. The intention is enter either an ICAO or IATA code. But clearly there are numerous unlicensed airfields and farm strips which have no allocated codes. The obvious solution would be to create another pick list containing these, progressively added to as and when, but how would this be controlled? Once again it would be preferable to have this as a limited field, only accepting the listed alternatives, prior approval being required for additions.

Personally I think it is beneficial to include the airfield location in the remarks, particularly if it is unlisted, at least until a resolution can be found.

Malcolm.

Hi Malcolm,

You are right. The two issues mentioned above have been long existed. I would also like to hear any suggestion on how we handle these.

For manufacturers, my current solution is this:

A separate database table contains all alias names for manufacturers, for example, Boeing Aircraft, Boeing Company, etc all point to a common name, Boeing. The aircraft data import program (run periodically on FAA dataset) will then change all found nick names to their respective common name.

But, this solution still has a glitch. Say Boeing 747 C/N 12345 already exists, someone enters Boeing company 747 C/N 12345. The import program will change the second entry to Boeing 747 C/N 12345. Now we have two identical entries.

Limiting manufacturers to a fixed list is not hard in programming, but will this cause any other problem or increase support request dramatically?

And our aircraft registry database need some clean up. That can only be done manually, which is almost impossible for me.

Thanks for the input.

Ken

Part of the problem with aircraft manufacturer names is at least two-fold. Companies making the same aircraft to its ATC rise and fall, and may rise again with a somewhat different or totally different name. Mooney aircraft are a good example, and look at the variation in Piper aircraft management and corporate names, to cite just two examples. The Luscombe 11E ATC was recently for sale again, and there has been very little production of the model. What company will buy, and what company name will they use?

The other issue is that our FAA typically takes for registration what the registrant supplies, with sales and resales of aircraft we see this frequently, even in initial registration of new aircraft you see variations from the expected. Shortcuts in naming or common names tend to prevail. Only rarely does the FAA seem to object to a frankly incorrect registration submission. I have addressed the foibles of the FAA database veracity here before. We just have to live with it, and do corrections of name or manufacturer if verifiable when we type our photo caption submissions here. If someone gets it wrong, they typically are jumped on when found out.

Ken's aircraft Manufacturer listing here by alphabet shows the problem very graphically. There are Country variations in the registration listings also. Some world countries are more rigid and therefore more uniform in their aircraft registrations than others.

Admin crew,

could you please ad Neuburg Air Base ETSN to the Airport data base? It is still an active airfield and it would be nice to have it listed.

Informations I could find were:

http://www.mil-airfields.de/de/flugplatz-fliegerhorst-neuburg-donau.htm

http://www.lsv-jg74m.de/03434b98b81329b05/03434b98b8132e30d/index.html

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagdgeschwader_74

Fritz