With the dramatic increase in hobbyist-created airports, we are getting
conflicts in airport IDs. We are currently limited to 5 ascii characters as an
ID. Expanding this limitation to 16 characters would allow many more IDs
without conflict. There is also a limitation of about 9000 meters for an apron
(for example) to be shown in the sim based on the airports location. You can
set the airport radius to 10000 or more, but it will not aid the display of
the apron. (Aprons being essential to cover anomalies in the Bing aerial
imagery). By expanding the airport IDs, we could create a ‘fake’ airport area,
and add aprons in areas in which there are no actual airports. If this were
increased to 16 characters, we’d have an almost unlimited ability to add
heliports, water ports, ultralight ports, glider ports, military ports, and of
course fictional ports. We could prefix them, for example, as AP, HE, WA, UL,
GL, MI, and FI, and still have 14 characters to ID the “airport” (AP being an
accepted real-world ID). It would solve a lot of problems like this. Also,
some real-world examples of airport IDs are greater than 5 characters: |
RU-2510| Greem Bell Air Base| Khatanga| 81.15| 64.33| 30
—|—|—|—|—|—|—
| CA-0171| Isachsen Airport| | 78.786517| -103.523051
—|—|—|—|—|—
| NO-0034| Longyearbyen Airport| Longyearbeyen| 78.214| 15.78| 20
—|—|—|—|—|—|—
| BR-0238| Valença do Piauí Airport| Valença do Piauí| -6.388103| -41.763983
—|—|—|—|—|—
There are dozens of actual examples that now require abbreviated or even
fictional IDs to be used in the sim.