View US Airport Runways In Google Earth, and More

Hi All,

I've made a few smallish improvements on my website, which extracts
airport information from the FAA's NASR database. The changes affect
all of the output file formats.

You can get to my website at http://www.soaringdata.info.

RUNWAY HIGHLIGHTING IN GOOGLE EARTH

In KML output files for Google Earth, a colored stripe now now
highlights the runway positions, or at least where the FAA thinks the
runways are. Yellow highlighting is used for solid surfaces (asphalt,
concrete) and green for soft surfaces (dirt, sand, gravel, grass,
etc.). Actually, this feature didn't turn out to be quite as cool as
I thought it would be, because apparently the operators of many little
airports with soft surface runways don't report the runway locations
to the FAA. Of course if the position isn't in the database I can't
draw the stripe. Oh well.

RIGHT-HAND PATTERN TRAFFIC INDICATION

For runways that are marked as using right-hand traffic patterns in
the FAA database, the runway description will now include an
indication that such is the case. This change affects the Google
Earth format as well as those that support glide computers, PDAs,
etc. For many instruments, the limited amount of space on the screen
has caused me to resort to a runway description coding that is a teeny
bit arcane. This is especially true for ILEC (.NDB), Cambridge
(.DAT) and Garmin-style airport descriptions. Users of these formats
are strongly encouraged to read a description of my new runway coding
scheme by following the "Choose a Companion File Format" help link on
my site, or by going directly to:

http://www.xmission.com/~lalley/airp...BComments.html

STANDARDIZED SURFACE TYPE CODINGS

John Leibacher and I have agreed on a set of single character runway
surface type codes, which I use whenever it is necessary to abbreviate
a runway surface description to a single character. We took some care
to provide as much backward compatibility as possible while at the
same time reconciling the differences that have been used in our
coding methods in the past. This changes the way I represent surface
types in. NDB files (for the ILEC SN-10) Cambridge .DAT files,
ClearNav .STX files, and Garmin-style comments. Moving forward, I
believe John will be using these same surface codes in the files on
the Worldwide Soaring Turnpoint Exchange. The link given above also
describes the new surface type codes.

Happy Downloading!
Lynn Alley
"2KA"