By kakugo - 2/7/2020 1:44:14 PM
Stupid question: if the PDFs are readily available from the SIA web site, why can't Skydemon get them from there?
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By pilot-byom - 2/8/2020 7:35:20 AM
@kakugo: Would you pay extra for this massive manual effort to every 28 days rip the big PDF apart and process manually? I guess this is major work, if not delivered process compatible.
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By grahamb - 2/8/2020 12:14:30 PM
+xStupid question: if the PDFs are readily available from the SIA web site, why can't Skydemon get them from there? Tim gets his AIP data as distributed via the single 'approved' channel. The answer is for France to fix their feed of data into that.
I can fully understand Tim not wanting to develop one-off non-standard methods that will be fraught with complexity and unanticipated challenges.
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By kakugo - 2/8/2020 3:06:13 PM
+x+xStupid question: if the PDFs are readily available from the SIA web site, why can't Skydemon get them from there? Tim gets his AIP data as distributed via the single 'approved' channel. The answer is for France to fix their feed of data into that.
I can fully understand Tim not wanting to develop one-off non-standard methods that will be fraught with complexity and unanticipated challenges.
Yes, I agree. It would be possible to write a script that downloads the PDFs for each plate from the SIA web site, but it would be ugly, fragile and of course they wouldn't be georeferenced. So it was a stupid question indeed. |
By Flying Dutchman - 10/14/2020 2:59:30 PM
+xMarkus, that's up to the people who create the PDFs, i.e. dozens of different authorities across Europe.
Flying Dutchman, interesting. That might be workable if we could prove it worked accurately and only spit out the IAC pages, I will give some further thought about how we could integrate that into our system workflow. Nice work! Hi Tim, any updates regarding this? |
By Tim Dawson - 10/15/2020 8:52:05 AM
They say they are still working on it, with another timestamp set for 1st December to discuss progress.
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By Flying Dutchman - 6/7/2020 12:00:48 PM
+xI suppose it wouldn't hurt to write to them yourself expressing the same desire. Hi Tim, I understand t he French have amalgamated their instrument plates into the "textual information" document in the Eurocontrol EAD system. In 2016 I saw a post of you, believing 'the French stated that they plan to reverse this change sometime in the coming months.' Have you got any update on this?
Today, I noticed that the Garmin Pilot App is able to get to the single plates (also with geo referencing), so somehow they achieved to sort of index the French charts. Below an example of LFLL. Would be great if this functionality can be restored, although I understand it's probably beyond your control.
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By pilot-byom - 6/7/2020 7:12:23 PM
+x+xI suppose it wouldn't hurt to write to them yourself expressing the same desire. Hi Tim, I understand t he French have amalgamated their instrument plates into the "textual information" document in the Eurocontrol EAD system. In 2016 I saw a post of you, believing 'the French stated that they plan to reverse this change sometime in the coming months.' Have you got any update on this?
Today, I noticed that the Garmin Pilot App is able to get to the single plates (also with geo referencing), so somehow they achieved to sort of index the French charts. Below an example of LFLL. Would be great if this functionality can be restored, although I understand it's probably beyond your control.
Thx for the hint - for curiosity I checked Garmin Pilot and ForeFlight, just for two of the competitors. Both show the georef'ed plates, so they somehow get separate PDFs. Maybe a good entry for Skydemon to approach SIA again? |
By Flying Dutchman - 6/7/2020 9:14:06 PM
+x+x+xI suppose it wouldn't hurt to write to them yourself expressing the same desire. Hi Tim, I understand t he French have amalgamated their instrument plates into the "textual information" document in the Eurocontrol EAD system. In 2016 I saw a post of you, believing 'the French stated that they plan to reverse this change sometime in the coming months.' Have you got any update on this?
Today, I noticed that the Garmin Pilot App is able to get to the single plates (also with geo referencing), so somehow they achieved to sort of index the French charts. Below an example of LFLL. Would be great if this functionality can be restored, although I understand it's probably beyond your control.
Thx for the hint - for curiosity I checked Garmin Pilot and ForeFlight, just for two of the competitors. Both show the georef'ed plates, so they somehow get separate PDFs. Maybe a good entry for Skydemon to approach SIA again? That might be an option. But the fact that those competitors are able to do it, makes me wonder if SkyDemon could do it now as well? I have no knowledge how SIA/Eurocontrol distribute the plates or through what kind of API such databases are accessed , but maybe now there's a new possibility to index the French plates? Or could there be another data source that Garmin Pilot and ForeFlight are using enabling them to index the French Charts? |
By grahamb - 6/8/2020 5:34:18 AM
+x+x+x+xI suppose it wouldn't hurt to write to them yourself expressing the same desire. Hi Tim, I understand t he French have amalgamated their instrument plates into the "textual information" document in the Eurocontrol EAD system. In 2016 I saw a post of you, believing 'the French stated that they plan to reverse this change sometime in the coming months.' Have you got any update on this?
Today, I noticed that the Garmin Pilot App is able to get to the single plates (also with geo referencing), so somehow they achieved to sort of index the French charts. Below an example of LFLL. Would be great if this functionality can be restored, although I understand it's probably beyond your control.
Thx for the hint - for curiosity I checked Garmin Pilot and ForeFlight, just for two of the competitors. Both show the georef'ed plates, so they somehow get separate PDFs. Maybe a good entry for Skydemon to approach SIA again? That might be an option. But the fact that those competitors are able to do it, makes me wonder if SkyDemon could do it now as well? I have no knowledge how SIA/Eurocontrol distribute the plates or through what kind of API such databases are accessed , but maybe now there's a new possibility to index the French plates? Or could there be another data source that Garmin Pilot and ForeFlight are using enabling them to index the French Charts? It may just be that Garmin and Foreflight are big enough to devote resource to bursting the pdfs before geo-referencing each month.
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By Tim Dawson - 6/8/2020 9:33:21 AM
Yes, it's possible other software packages are splitting the PDFs themselves. We have been chasing the French (via Eurocontrol) to publish their IACs properly for a number of years now, but we cannot force them.
Clearly this is undesirable, so I'm following this up today to try to get some answers.
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By Flying Dutchman - 6/8/2020 9:14:59 PM
+xYes, it's possible other software packages are splitting the PDFs themselves. We have been chasing the French (via Eurocontrol) to publish their IACs properly for a number of years now, but we cannot force them.
Clearly this is undesirable, so I'm following this up today to try to get some answers. Looking forward to hear if you get any answers.
I wonder if other software packages are splitting the PDF’s, how they do it. Because besides possibly splitting the PDF's, they also manage to get them each geo-referenced. Grahamb points out that the data arrives via a single ‘approved’ channel (I guess then via Eurocontrol). What kind of metadata or other document properties are accessible in the PDF's through the used channel? Do we know if other software packages use the same data source? If you see any possibility, I offer to help coding something that is able to separate / extract the PDF’s in single IACs 
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By Tim Dawson - 6/9/2020 8:56:44 AM
There's no metadata in PDFs for georeferencing; it's an entirely manual process.
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By pilot-byom - 6/10/2020 6:01:11 AM
+xThere's no metadata in PDFs for georeferencing; it's an entirely manual process.
Just for curiosity, why didn't you go for the Geospatial PDF format?
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By Flying Dutchman - 6/10/2020 3:18:40 PM
+xThere's no metadata in PDFs for georeferencing; it's an entirely manual process. Personally I see the georeferencing as a 'nice to have'. However being able to access a single IAC / STAR / SID plate instead of scrolling through a huge document would be a great. I understand SD is not the problem but the data is, and that this feature in fact exists in SD, and you're requesting SIA to fix this, but in the last years this unfortunately didn't help.
I know that you only want to implement something if it is good, but I think we can implement a stable script with enough sanity checks, that indexes the big pdf and throws out individual plates. To test it, I wrote a Python script that takes as input the big pdf as a whole. It takes the title names of every page which is located either in the top left or right corner, and then exports single IAC plates pdf's based on the name. I tested with LFGJ, LFLL and LFAB and it works. I'm willing to help implementing this in another programming language or adapt it to meet SD's high integrity standard for the data.
Example LFGJ.pdf output of the indexing step of the script: page 0 : .LFGJ -1
page 1 : .LFGJ -2
page 2 : .LFGJ -3
page 3 : .LFGJ -4
page 4 : .LFGJ -5
page 5 : No data obtained
page 6 : LFGJ ADC 01
page 7 : LFGJ APDC 01
page 8 : LFGJ AOC RWY 05/23
page 9 : LFGJ DATA 01
page 10 : LFGJ DATA RWY05 RNP Y CODE
page 11 : LFGJ DATA RWY05 RNP Z CODE
page 12 : LFGJ DATA RWY05 RNP Z FASDB
page 13 : LFGJ IAC RWY05 ILS LOC
page 14 : LFGJ IAC RWY05 NDB
page 15 : LFGJ IAC RWY05 RNP Y
page 16 : LFGJ IAC RWY05 RNP Z
page 17 : LFGJ COM 01
Then saves the IAC's:
save page 13 as: RWY05 ILS LOC
created RWY05 ILS LOC.pdf
save page 14 as: RWY05 NDB
created RWY05 NDB.pdf
save page 15 as: RWY05 RNP Y
created RWY05 RNP Y.pdf
save page 16 as: RWY05 RNP Z
created RWY05 RNP Z.pdf
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By jfw - 9/3/2019 8:12:42 AM
Hello, I can see the instruments plates for the different countries I have active (BE, NL, D, UK, LUX) but not in France. Am I missing something or are these not (yet ?) available ? If the latter, any view when these will be available ?
Thanks in advance. J
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By jfw - 1/31/2024 12:09:23 PM
Has there been any progress on this recently ? As Skydemon is also becoming an option for GA IFR, mising French plates is rather annoying...
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By Tim Dawson - 2/1/2024 11:08:07 AM
No, sadly the French still wish to distribute their plates in this manner. Nobody at Eurocontrol even responded to my last chase on this issue, which was in March 2023. I've chased again.
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By Tim Dawson - 6/12/2020 8:44:45 AM
Markus, that's up to the people who create the PDFs, i.e. dozens of different authorities across Europe.
Flying Dutchman, interesting. That might be workable if we could prove it worked accurately and only spit out the IAC pages, I will give some further thought about how we could integrate that into our system workflow. Nice work!
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