When configuring my Flight Feeder site information, the selection for nearest airport options are only for public airports. Yet my feeder is on a busy private airport. Is there any way for Flightaware to change the field to include private Airports?
Unrelated, sorry for OT, it’s interesting the note on top of your posting:
It’s been a while since we’ve seen mmeadows — their last post was > 13y ago.
Is that the case???
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A somewhat related question was asked not long ago:
Non-ICAO airports have no support for ADS-B flights; therefore most US airports including FlightFeeder hosts are excluded
Anyway the airport listed as site information is just the closest ICAO airport i believe.
It’s mostly for some regional grouping of stations.
We also have a Flight Feeder installed on a busy private airport. I understand from FlightAware staff that they only recognize arrivals & departures for airports with ICAO codes from Flight Feeder data including ADS-B data. This has something to do with ICAO only airports. Apparently there ADS-B system can only recognize ICAO codes. Including non-ICAO airports is on there “to do” list; however, I was told it will take some time.
We still see the occasional Arrival or Departure on our airport page (https://flightaware.com/live/airport/09FA) when the pilot has filed a flight plan to or from our airport as this data is from FAA feeds, not the Flight Feeder.
Thanks for the reply. Seems odd that they only handle airports with ICAO codes which are the minority of US airports. The US Flight plan system has just been obsoleted and uses the ICAO International Flight plan system. Even the US Government’s crack software team was able to create a work around. For airports that don’t have an ICAO identifier, you code ZZZZ and then in the remarks field, add the US identifier. With some software magic, the ATC computers can figure out where you want to go to and from.
That’s not the problem.
If a flight plan has been filed, the flight is correctly attributed also to small airports as far as i understand.
But for flights with no filed plan, they have to guess the origin and destination.
They don’t want to get actual passenger flights wrong, so they have only included airports in this logic which have regular passenger service.
And as for the identifier associated with your receiver stats, that’s just for display and doesn’t matter.
As you can also guess from the other thread, FA is a business and as such will probably more likely add your airport if a paying customer uses that airport and requires proper detection.
This adding an airport requires defining on a map where the runways are and needs some manual changes.
As obj described, it’s hard to do it reliably automatically for the whole US.
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I run a PiAware system at a friend’s home in California, she is very close to KOKB (Oceanside Municiple) which is a very small airfield. Certainly no scheduled airline arrivals and departures. This shows up on my configuration page.
Geffers
No, I see many ICAO airport ADS-B Arrivals/Departures that don’t have, and will never have passenger service. Also, an ICAO code is not necessarily required for passenger service though likely all passenger airports have one.
Only the few airports that have ICAO codes are tracked via ADS-B. In fact, ADS-B flights that land at nearby non-ICAO airports show up on the nearest ICAO airport page creating confusion among paying customers.
Noticed that ADS-B (position only) flights now show up on all airports with FAA location identifiers. This brings FlightAware to a whole new level making it so much more useful to the majority of US airports and FBO.
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My feeder site is on a small private airport, which has been on the sectional charts for at least 35 years.
What sparked my interest was that somehow FA mistakenly flagged one of the oil field leak / spill patrol aircraft that overflew an even less used private airport about 20 miles away (12XA) as two separate flights this morning - one originating from 7T7 and “last seen near” Midland, then showed the very next segment of the same trip only 15 seconds later as having originated from 12XA.
I downloaded both KML tracks, opened them in GEdit, and cut / pasted the two together as a single track and discovered the only 10 second gap between “landing” and “taking off”.
This makes me think that our own private airport might be in the database, although there aren’t that many arrivals and departures any more like there were a decade ago.
How does one actually look this up? The FAA website seems to not be well documented as to actually how to put in coordinates or the common name printed on the sectional chart and return the FAA location identifier.
Hi,
Have a look at skyvector.com. Some of the very small private fields are listed on the chart without an FAA identifier. However, if you search for the airport name you might be able to locate the airfield with the FAA ID.
Using your example of 12XA near Midland, TX. I noticed an airfield called Bates field about 14 nm away. Searching for Bates gave the FAA is as 71TA Bates Field Airport. You might be able to locate the one you are looking for this way.
Here is a direct skyvector.com link complete with a flight plan from 12XA to 71TA.
Here is a direct link to Bates Field. You can use the “Airports” link at the top to search for other nearby names.
https://skyvector.com/airport/71TA/Bates-Field-Airport
Good luck,
-Dan
Awesome. Your google-fu is a lot better than mine. Thanks for posting that, as I’ve wondered how to look all that up for quite a while, but wasn’t really sure where to look.
Now maybe I can update my PiAware nearest airport manually to 71TA rather than just “near KMAF”.
So SkyVector is one of the modern ways to generate a flight plan? Things sure have changed since using a plotter, sectional, and E6B as a 17 year old to work out everything.
I’m quite familiar with Bates Field. My PiAware feeder is only about 1,320 feet from the runway.
Part of the plan this weekend is to see if it will let me update the airport designator (or balk at it), move the hardware to a weatherproof box actually on the tower where it can be jacked directly into the router for a more reliable internet connection, and mount the whole thing 50 feet up at the end of a run of Cat-6 cable that is set up to run Power Over Ethernet, which ought to reduce the number of outages and give it “look-down” capability to see helicopters on the ground at 2 or 3 hospitals and possibly lower altitude captures at 7T7 a few miles to the east - possibly even get some positions during takeoff and landing rolls.
HI,
The E6B, plotter, and dividers are still out there, but these days you are more likely to find even military crews using an iPad with ForeFlight for inflight charts and approach plates, and a PDF reader like GoodReader for electronic publications. More tactical ground planning is often done on Windows based systems. Both ForeFlight and the windows software will usually have infight GPS feeds along with the aircraft dedicated internal systems.
ForeFlight and their Military Flight Bag version is incredibly easy to use and very powerful.
I have always used SkyVector as a quick online way to look at things or display a route. What is nice is that you can configure an entire route and then e-mail a link or save the entire thing as a bookmark. Make sure you also check out their other chart type selections in the top right. If you want to see a single sectional including the borders and legend, just select the sectional name like “San Antonio” instead of the “World VFR” that I linked to. The enroute charts are also handy and much less cluttered than the sectionals if you are just interested in the airways.
One final tip. An even quicker way to identify a field like Bates on the sectional (without the FAA ID), is just to right-click on the airfield. That will offer to create a waypoint at the field and also identify the FAA ID at the same time. Just be careful, because some of the helicopter pads and really small fields not listed will show the nearest field and not the one you are trying to select.
-Dan
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That is a surprise to see Windows and aviation in the same sentence, just because I’ve seen Windows have plenty of emotional meltdowns in the midst of numerous oil field, engineering, accounting, tax preparation, CNC machining and industrial control applications. It is about as startling as going out one morning to discover a unicorn in the yard eating the plants in the flowerbed.
But I guess as long as it’s a totally separate device that has no direct interconnection with the aircraft systems other than charging power, it’s one more layer of redundancy to supplement good old fashioned pencil and paper.
Speaking of helicopter pads, I have been watching a lot of medical transport operations to / from the area hospitals.
So far I have collected a couple dozen or so helipad coordinates throughout this part of west Texas and southeastern New Mexico, and verified them with either Google Earth or ground level visits. Thus, I have some data points that could likely be fed straight into a starter list of known heliports if there is a place to submit it. The format could be almost anything that GPS Babel can export, although I have them saved as KML and GPX files.
Another question more off topic - how do you upload a non-picture file - such as a GPX or KML file, or a zip of .json or similar files, or even a .c, .cpp, .h, .asm, .py, .pl, etc. source code file if one is trying to illustrate a particular anomalous observation, an algorithm to pass around for improvement ideas, or compare raw vs processed data from a specific event?