Presagis

I found a new bug!  I’m so excited, but confess that it is unlikely that it will ever affect anyone else, but here it is:

I’ve never seen this called out, nor have I run into the problem until now.

When reading DAFIF data with the runway wizard, if there are two (or more) airports with identical text names, which does occur, only the last is displayed and available, presumably because Creator reorders the list by alphabetical order of the airport name, and most likely drops duplicates in the sort.

For instance, US12009 KFFT, US25411 KCXY, and US26312 KLAN are all in the ARPT.txt file, with identical names of “CAPITAL CITY”.  Neither KFFT nor KCXY are available by ICAO or name in the runway wizard.

Ironically enough, while this has never happened to me before, in the last 2 months all three of these airfields have shown up on 3 different project specs.

BTW - temp workaround is to copy (to save an original) then edit DAFIFT/ARPT/ARPT.TXT and comment out or delete the ones that occur after the one you want, if yours is the last yours will show up.

An even better temporary workaround to my own bug - I edited the ARPT.TXT file and added the stat abbreviation to the end of hte name so all three show up as uniquely named airports.

I say temproary becuse we get DAFIF updates every month, so would have to make this change every time we install new data.

I will also feedback to NGA that maybe this name should be unique, but they will probably not change since it is not called out in the spec.

That’s a good find.  We’ll add it to the bug list.  I guess the airport namers had a little too much to drink that day.

I just went through the ARPT.TXT list and found a good 75-100 airports with non-unique names, so it is not trivial .....

I’m interested in how, after you edited your RWY.TXT file, that you were able to import it into TerraVista.  The TerraVista “help” page on “To Import DAFIF data” only describes how to import the RWY.SHP file… how do you import a RWY.TXT DAFIF file?

UPDATE: ... My error, I erroneously assumed this was a Terra Vista Forum, but it is a Creator forum (I came to this thread directly from a link I found after an Internet Search on “editing DAFIF”, and it wasn’t originally clear which Forum I was participating in - I erroneously assumed it was a Terra Vista forum) ... anyway, it looks like you can’t import RWY.TXT in TerraVista, but can in Creator.  Hmmm… I wonder if it is possible to edit RWY.SHP files…

TerraVista’s interpretation of a RWY.shp file is a completely differnet kettle of fish.  I was referring to the Runway Wizard in Creator, which looks at the ascii DAFIF runway data, whereas .shp refers to an ESRI shapefile.  Shapefiles can be edited with ArcMap, similar in nature to editing a .flt in Creator.

Creator can export .shp form a polygonal OpenFlight file generated by the runway wizard, but I don’t know if it can be imported into T.V., we’ve never tried that.  there is probably a way to do it if the projections and whatnot are all right.

Kent,

I fixed this bug and it should be in the 4.1 patch coming out soon.  I simply appended the ICAO name to the airport name to make it unique and then it is not removed when I insert it into the map.

Actually, we fixed this in 4.1 so you don’t need to wait for the patch.