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FREE FAA Sectionals, Terminal Area Charts, and Flight Directory

Snowflake

Snowflake

Sidney, BC, Canada
Sponsor
I'm not sure how many others have noticed this or not, but the FAA has started allowing *free* downloads of a lot of their digital products. That includes Sectionals, Aerodrome/Flight Directories, Terminal Area Charts, etc.

FAA Sectionals

VFR Terminal Area Charts

Aerodrome/Flight Directory

Note that each chart is about a 40MB download, so it might take a little while. The A/FD is unfortunately done on a page-by-page basis, so you can't download an entire volume easily. But a clever person could probably figure out a way to write a script to download the individual pages and then join them all into a single PDF.

For anyone looking for a way to make use of this digital data, and who happens to have an iPad lying around, here's another suggestion: Go download an app called Transit Maps. It's a free program designed for reading transit maps for various cities around the world. But a side effect is that it turns out to be an excellent large-image viewer as well. I downloaded a few charts, converted them from TIF to PNG (the developer is looking at adding TIF support but hasn't yet), and transferred them to Transit Maps using a simple http server.

The maps take a second or two to load initially, but once they're in, you can pan, zoom, etc. and it works just like Google Maps, with the center loading first in lower resolution and then higher resolution getting added later. This works becuase Transit Maps processes the raw image to create "tiles" of images that it can load quickly, then go back and get the higher resolution data. It's very usable.

All that's missing is to geo-reference the images, and then put a GPS bug on the screen to track your position. But neither of those tasks is trivial. Viewing a static map, is. With this strapped to your knee, you could toss all of your paper maps.

There may be better applications for viewing these, if anyone has suggestions i'm all ears. But for the price, this is excellent.
 
Check out:

http://www.pdfplates.com

Free (donation requested) plates and even viewing software. For $139 for the new Amazon Kindle, you can bring a library of electronic charts and manuals.

It would make great sense with the confines of an RV cockpit, particularly the 3,4, and 8.

Be sure and review AC 120-76A for legality and procedures for the use of an EFB:

http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAdvisoryCircular.nsf/0/B5DE2A1CAC2E1F7B86256CED00786888?OpenDocument

Here is an FAA job aid on the subject:

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/avs/offices/afs/afs400/afs430/media/efb_job_aid.pdf
 
PDF Plates is a good site... I wasn't aware someone was already hosting the A/FD's.

I was able to download the A/FD and convert it to a document in about three lines of scripting. I wonder if it would make sense to just supply a script to people to download (or a program with a nice GUI to make it easier) and then all the data would come direct from the FAA rather than require hosting on some third-party site?

Oh, and for what it's worth, I tried loading one of the TIF sectionals with Good Reader on the iPad. While it loads, and you can pan around, the image when you zoom in becomes very blurry. Definitely not something i'd want in the cockpit.
 
PDF Plates is run by a friend of mine, and RV-7 Builder.

I know that he has done a lot of work in assembling the PDF in such a way that portable readers like the iPad and kindle can use the bookmarks, etc. This allows you to jump to a particular area in the "book" quickly.
 
BrentHumphreys said:
PDF Plates is run by a friend of mine, and RV-7 Builder.

I know that he has done a lot of work in assembling the PDF in such a way that portable readers like the iPad and kindle can use the bookmarks, etc. This allows you to jump to a particular area in the "book" quickly.
Click to expand...

Seems like a good guy. Most people would choose to try and get rich from it. And I wouldn't blame anyone for doing so.
 
mtaviator said:
Seems like a good guy. Most people would choose to try and get rich from it. And I wouldn't blame anyone for doing so.
Click to expand...
If everyone who used it chipped in $1 each time they downloaded a new A/FD, i'm sure he'd cover his hosting costs. And it would be the cheapest update you bought for any of your electronic devices this year (grumble grumble Garmin grumble grumble).

Thinking about this, what would be really nice is an iPad app that works like the AOPA airports guide app... The app tracks what A/FD's you want to download, and automatically alerts you when a newer one is ready for download and then downloads it for you. Yeah, I know, i'm just lazy. :)
 
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Preserving the FAA data integrity

I like this solution. I've had past problems with the quality of the Jeppesen/Garmin updates. I described it in a thread called "data integrity..." I learned a great deal through that incident.

In researching the origin of the data, I did come across the FAA's digital products download page. I grabbed a few of the publicly available digital products. I won't call them free, since as taxpayers we certainly paid for them ;). However, it's very tedious to get everything you need when you've got to do it airport by airport. PDFplates fixes that, at least with the AFD and IAPs. And... they don't futz with the data, so whatever the FAA publishes, is what I'll be looking at.

PDFPlates reports on the website,

Standard PDFPlates are the FAA issued plates. No post processing is done other than the PDFPlates compilation and indexing. The plates are full color where applicable.

Very nice... I'm kicking in my couple bucks:D
 
Snowflake said:
I wonder if it would make sense to just supply a script to people to download (or a program with a nice GUI to make it easier) and then all the data would come direct from the FAA rather than require hosting on some third-party site?
Click to expand...

Been done. Where you been.

There are many methods for getting em.
You could even have searched these forums for free plates downloads and gotten all kinds of great information on it.
 
Electronic AFD

So since Flightguide decided they would no longer make the little book I have come to love, I read this thread with an eye on my future. I looked around at oshkosh to see what other electronic or paper alternatives were around. I really never paid much attention till then since I was happy with flightguide. Each time there was a monthly fee, some more, some less. Or you needed a PC or Kindle or Ipad. Nothing got me excited. My Gamin does have the info but cost of updates keep them to a minimum and a 396 has no airport diagrams. This thread got me going again. Well the last couple of evenings I played around with my Blackberry and two FREE apps that may do the job. I don't fly IFR but do like to have all the info handy I can get.

I have a Blackberry Curve....first I had to buy a 8G card online for under $20.
Then I followed the instructions for FltDeck and installed it. I began to play with it pulling up airports I know to see what info it had and how it would work. All in all not bad. Cons,,,, kinda of a pain to scroll down to an airport. I pulled up KCLW (Clearwater airpark). Clearwater has right traffic on runway 34 but could not find that info on the blackberry and that I did not like. So
I decided to try the second app.

AOPA has a FREE to members electronic AFD for the Blackberry. I finally got my phone to download it and set it all up.
Pretty cool, easy to use, lots more info, and runway 34 at KCLW showed "RP" for right patern. It has a search feature by airport name. My phone is always there. Its easy to get to, use and is on my belt so its in the cockpit. Nothing to buy.....no monthly fee....has the info I need.

So anyway I thought I would post this here for those that don't want or need an Ipad, Kindle, small PC or one more thing in the plane....my phone was already there. They do support most smartphones.

Google Fltdeck , they have an interactive page that works like the app.
AOPA....well www.aopa.org and search Blackberry or <your phone>

Sal Capra
N898SC
Lakeland
 
Kahuna said:
Been done. Where you been.

There are many methods for getting em.
You could even have searched these forums for free plates downloads and gotten all kinds of great information on it.
Click to expand...
In fact, I did just that. I found a lot of links to downloading PLATES. To me, a VFR pilot, the term plates suggests IFR approaches. I don't want or need that.

What I didn't find is links or help in finding the CHARTS, ie. sectionals and terminal charts, which just recently became free, or the AFD.

What I can't tell from the mstewart site is whether using it will get me a copy of these or not. Again, lots of info on PLATES, not so much on the AFD.

But thanks for the snarky response that missed the point of my original post. :)
 
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I use the free download version of the Air Force flight planning tool Falconview to geo-reference the free downloaded FAA sectionals. I use it exclusively for preflight planning and can generate co-ordinates for places of interest for upload to my GPS without fat-fingering anything in.
 
Feetwet said:
I use the free download version of the Air Force flight planning tool Falconview to geo-reference the free downloaded FAA sectionals. I use it exclusively for preflight planning and can generate co-ordinates for places of interest for upload to my GPS without fat-fingering anything in.
Click to expand...


Wait, you can import the sectionals to falconview as map data?
 
Snowflake and Sig600 - sorry I'm late with this reply, got busy doing other things before your replies came in.

You can find the site just by searching on falconview, but the following will get you there:
http://www.falconview.org/trac/FalconView

The site has a download section for the program, as well as older sectionals, but the Northern Alaska sectionals are missing. I have falconview loaded and working on both my xp computer and my wife's computer with Vista on it, then when she upgraded to windows 7, it still worked fine without doing anything else. You can upload current FAA sectionals and other map formats as well.

You can view my approach to using the program by downloading the following:
http://home.comcast.net/~susangoebel/FltPlanReadMe.doc
 
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