The Digital Aeronautical Flight Information Files (DAFIF) distributed by the US National Imagery and Mapping Agency are now available free of charge by FTP download. These files were once available by CD-ROM on a subscription basis only. They contain information for many major airports all around the world, making them an ideal source of information for database files for countries other than the United States. Support for DAFIF files is planned for the next release of avdbtools.
New US database files were posted today based on NASD files valid from Dec 30, 1999 to Feb 24, 2000. I have modified the components of avdbtools to work with the NASD ISO 9660 CD-ROM distribution. This new release of avdbtools will be available soon. The documentation needs to be fixed first.
Release 1.4.2 of fplan is available for download. It's mostly a bug fix release, however it also contains an implementation of the graphical previewer based on the Gnome, Gtk+, Glib libraries. This release should still be considered a beta release! All users are encouraged to upgrade.
Thanks to efforts by Michael Johnson, fplan is now officially part of
the Gnome Project. As a result,
the fplan project now has a CVS repository to facilitate development by
multiple programmers as well as a mailing list. The list is intended to
provide a forum for the discussion of fplan development tasks and design
issues. The list is open to all who would like to participate in fplan
development, contribute ideas or suggestions, or simply lurk to keep
track of where things are going. To join the list, send a mail message
with the subject "subscribe" and an empty message body to
New database files have been released, converted from the same set of NFDC data files used for the last release. A problem was identified with the paddb utility. It didn't properly handle input records that were longer than the internal buffer. As a result, the database contained spurious records. The only apparent side effect is that the lookup routines might fail to find an entry that really is in the database. If you are experiencing difficulty with database lookup failures, you should download the new database files. Thanks to Malcolm Boffey, <malc@siren.eng.sun.com> for identifying this problem.
Michael K. Johnson has started an implementation of the previewer based on the GNOME and GTK+, GLIB projects. He has also volunteered to develop a flexible postscript based output format that is user configurable. Thanks for your enthusiasm Michael!