I got mad that I didn't have any SID's or STAR's in flight gear, and it irked me so much that you are now reading this.
If you are reading this, you probably really want to know what is going on here. Let me explain.
The FAA provides a product called the Codified Instrument Flight Procedures (CIFP) which can be found here. Unfortunately, some greedy people twisted the FAA's arm into providing this data is a weird format: ARINC 424. This format is not good for anything, so in order to use it, one must first transcode it. That is what this repository aims to do.
By transcoding the FAA's data, we can load it into flightgear so that your autopilot-equipped airplane can follow these procedures which are like directions into and out of airports.
The drawback, though, is that only airports under the purview of the FAA is included here. In theory, if you have ARINC 424-encoded data for other airports, you should be able to feed it in and transcode it all the same, but that information is not freely and widely available.
First, a question:
Does your flightgear use outdated runway designators? (Ex: KSNA today has runway 20R, 2L, but my flightgear running 2020.3.18 says KSNA has 19R, 1L)
- Yes, runways are outdated:
- If you are using v2020.3.* of older (warranty void if older), use the 2020.3 files, if using 2020.4.*, use the 2020.4 folder
- No, runways are all correct:
- You will be using the files in the 2020.4 folder
With the folder in mind, clone the repo.
Not sure what cloning is? See github's tutorial. Note that you can just download the zip.
Now that we got files, let's get fg to use them!
Take the folder that you want (2020.3/2020.4 from above) and go into the fg launcher, goto Add-ons and add the folder as a custom scenery folder. It is as easy as that!
Now, locate where your FLIGHTGEAR SCENERY folder is located. Wiki
Some common places to look are:
%ProgramFiles%/FlightGear/data/Scenery
Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/Scenery
~/.local/share/flatpak/app/org.flightgear.FlightGear/x86_64/stable/active/files/share/flightgear/Scenery
Goto your fg root, and from there, find
dnc-managed/install/flightgear/fgdata/Scenery
In the scenery directory should be a folder called Airports, open it.
Now, take the contents of the folder you chose to use earlier (2020.3/4) and merge the Airports folder in the 2020.X folder with the one there.
And that should be it!
First, this is not a complete dataset for the whole world, only airports under the purview of the FAA. To check if your airport is supported, use this website https://www.airnav.com/airport. They get their data from the same place as me, so if they don't have it, I won't either
This does not run out of the box, unfortunately. You need to download the CIFP, extract it, and rename the folder to current_cifp.
Next, we need an apt.dat from flightgear in order to handle runways that have moved (with respect to earth's shifting magnetic field). This should be under fgdata/Airports in your flightgear install. It will come as a tarball, so windows users will need extra software to uncompress it.
With the uncompressed apt.dat placed next to index.js, we can run it all with node index.js.
You may want to comment out all references to LocalAirports and realairports, as those are local symlinks to my installs so I can automagically just have my fg data updated when i run it.
Also, if memory usage is of the essence, you can trade some runtime for lesser memory usage by adding the node flag --expose-gc. On my machine, I saw ~10-20% increase in time for a ~30%-40% degrease in memory used.
If you dont have node installed, you can get it here. I use 12.19.0 because there are a lot of changed that I CBA to keep up with all the changes.
No. If I am going to translate, I am going to c(\+\+)? for compat with fg and performance reasons.
The output of the program (the 2020.4 and 2020.3 folders) are licensed under CC BY 4.0. See also 2020.3 and 2020.4
The program itself, (./arinc424parser.js and ./index.js) are licensed under GPL V2.0 or later see also LICENSE