Parachute Jump Areas in US Airspace Data

At the suggestion of Ramy Yanetz and with the assistance of John
Leibacher, I've added Parachute Jump Areas (also known as Drop Zones)
to the US Airspace files published on my website at http://www.soaringdata.info.
These same files will be available soon on the Airspace section of the
Worldwide Soaring Turnpoint Exchange. The source of the data is the
NASR data published by the National Flight Data Center.

Most PJAs are specified as circles with a defined radius, but a fairly
large minority just list the center point. In such cases I use a
default of 3 NM.

I have encoded PJAs as "Danger" area ("AC Q" in the OpenAir format).
If, for some reason, you prefer not to see them, you will find them
grouped together in the file so that they can be conveniently removed
using a text editor.

If you're wondering about this change having any impact in contest
flying, there should be essentially none. In the US, "Danger" areas
are generally not closed to contests, so they are not included in the
site files that describe closed airspace that are published on the
Soaring Turnpoint Exchange. Of course in some specific case a CD
could elect to close a PJA.

Happy downloading!

Lynn Alley
"2KA"