Experimental Flight Plans - Information

[charlymorton]

Yes, it's quite annoying, but at least it has made me think about the next steps on how I want to progress with these flight plans going forward.

Although the operator's address is normally listed, I don't use the information as I rely on tracking data only. A long time ago, when I used my own version of the RPP spreadsheet (or it could have been even before that), I used geolocation of US post codes to find the nearest airport for all US registered aircraft.
This works for most countries I think. In France the base airport is listed in the registry itself, which is very helpful.

The issue is for countries where this information isn't freely available, such as privately owned aircraft in Sweden.

[mage]

When making flightplans for all modelled-in-FS9 helicopters in mid 2020 - 808 of them, a list that is now closer to 830 - bases were a huge problem. Most helicopters are not based at airfields anyway (so I needed 500+ off-airport AFDs, a process I automated in Excel, transposing a fixed-layout AFD across multiple locations using just the airfield coordinates and the elevation, and a fake ICAO code), but there are also a great number with owner details in the center of London, and I knew they were not based there. It was quite a painful process. The idea that departure points could be triangulated automatically through automation would have saved a lot of effort.

I also discovered that creating new airfields causes a lot of problems with GPS clutter and also VFR position reporting "3 miles south of where? A farm?"