I’m currently working on updating Borg El Arab Airport in Egypt.
In real life, its ICAO recently changed from HEBA to HEAX, replacing the old Alexandria El Nouzha (HEAX) airport, which is now permanently closed.
I updated my project accordingly — renamed the airport ident from HEBA to HEAX, corrected coordinates to Borg El Arab’s location, and removed all old exclusions.
Everything compiles fine, but in-sim the runways, taxiways, and aprons vanish, leaving only terminal models visible.
If I switch the ICAO back to HEBA, everything works perfectly again.
I tried to do exclusion rectangle it did delete the both HEAX- elnozha airport and HEBA borg el arab then made a new airport with icao HEAX in the same place as HEBA but taxiways and runways all disappear
Also tried doing closed airport method the the old HEAX instead of exclusion but this made both HEAX old and new one closed. And can’t use that icao again.
My question is:
What Is this the officially recommended method to replace or reassign an existing ICAO code in the SDK?
Also The icao should have changed with the AIRAC cycle of 2024 but it didn’t at least for me but it did change in flight planner website.
So, is there a way to update the airac cycle without subscription because I can’t ask people who want to download the airport to get a navigraph subscription.
The AIRAC standard has extremely limited data about airports themselves, no layout of any kind except for the runways themselves. As such, airports in the sim are a part of scenery, and not a part of the navdata. Data attached to airports, such as procedures, are part of navdata, but the airport itself is not.
We do run checks against these airport scenery definitions each AIRAC update to try and catch changes from the limited data that does exist in the AIRAC standard, such as runway re-numbering. Runway additions or deletions is a bit more difficult as it requires a scenery developer to intervene and make the appropriate airport layout changes, but they do get flagged for prioritization each cycle.
Wholesale airport replacements, where the ICAO is changing, is a much larger challenge, since the ICAO itself is the primary identifier of the airport, and indeed in this case, all the secondary identifiers of the airport also changed (such as the airport name), so that would have been of no particular help in catching it either. Relying on the airport origin is difficult as well, as those shift around and can be different in different data sets.
The issue has been logged for this particular airport and will be corrected in a future update, though.
EGKF doesn’t appear in the AIRINC (or indeed in the UK national AIP as far as I can tell) and appears to be an unlicensed small airstrip. It wouldn’t be something that we (Working Title) would have forwarded on as a potential rename since we only deal with the navdata side and it doesn’t appear there, so I’m not sure.
It would be nice indeed; unfortunately there are historical Flight Simulator backwards compatibility reasons why it would be somewhat massively challenging to make this doable (and very destructive to the existing scenery system). Maybe in a far-future MSFS that breaks with some of these backwards compatibilities (although as we see in every version of any simulator, this is very hard to achieve in practice due to both user and developer demands).
I appreciate it’s not your responsibly when it doesn’t include navdata.
Unfortunately it seems to be nobody’s responsibility to update the sim’s airfield data regardless of how small the airfields are. 3rd party devs are unable to assist too.
I guess my greater point here is that the airport doesn’t appear in the AIRAC at all, nor yet in the NATS AIP database (that link isn’t working for me, but going straight to NATS and looking online at the AIP for cycles 2510, 2511, and 2512 doesn’t reveal that assignment yet). So that makes it a bit difficult for us to flag.
I don’t think this is really the correct takeaway here, in my opinion. As you can see, there is a rather extensive process in place that we have to try and catch airport changes, but there is a blind spot when it is about airfields that don’t appear in the AIRAC at all nor have official ICAO designations, because there simply is no data source available to alert anyone to this kind of thing. So, we have to rely on user reports and other things of that nature.
Sorry not sure why the url didn’t work. I’ve replaced it with the direct link to the AIRAC update pdf. It’s a rather large file but EGKF is right at the top.
It will be easier to make us able to update and remove the icao in the sdk instead of waiting for how long, maybe a year or two for the sim to update it. And the sim don’t really update the Middle East or hasn’t done it very well, like they have done in Europe or in USA
I do see it now there in the PDF link you have; I’m not totally sure why it didn’t appear in the online version of any of the cycles I looked through. Regardless, our data provider (LIDO) doesn’t have it in their AIRAC yet (nor does it appear that Jeppesen does either), so we’re at the mercy of those types of things to even know to flag the issue.