Routes situation

[bratters]

The routes situation seems to be deteriorating again.

This may well be due to the introduction of summer schedules but surprisingly(?) there are some hefty gaps appearing in national carriers like KLM, EIN & BAW. The lo-cost airlines are as patchy as ever and Whizz and flybe are particularly poor.

I use Flight Display Lite (for which many thanks!!) with the Airnav Route Autopopulate facility off but can anyone tell me how reliable the latter is nowadays and is it worth using?

[AirNav Support]

The refresh hasn't happened yet for our Flight Database to pull in the new summer schedules. We are still seeing a lot of gaps so holding off for a bit.

If you are using Flight Display Lite only and seeing gaps it does really highlight how difficult it is to get accurate and reliable route data even when you are using many sources.

Having said that as the new schedules have come in recently, the data should be more reliable soon as people identify flights.

[bratters]

Thanks for a prompt reply Airnav.

[tarbat]

I stopped using FDLite a while ago in favour of using the routes download available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PP-logs-and-routes/

If you've got specific examples of missing routes I'm happy to check if these are included in that download.  Today's download includes 859 KLM routes, 572 EIN routes, and 1155 BAW routes.

If you decide to use the database from Yahoo groups, this query generates what you need to import into Radabox:

SELECT DISTINCT 
  FlightRoute.flight AS FN,
  substr(FlightRoute.route,1,4) AS NO,
  substr(FlightRoute.route,length(FlightRoute.route)-3,4) AS ND,
  "" AS NV,
  substr(date('now'),1,4) || substr(date('now'),6,2) || substr(date('now'),9,2) || "090000" AS CH
FROM
 FlightRoute
ORDER BY
  FN

[Evanelpus]

Someone told me that the routes situation is a well known problem and that Air Nav only updates this part of the database every six months.

Is this true?  If it is, how does the database ever catch up with routes etc between summer and winter schedules?

[Runway 31]

Tarbat,

For someone who is very interested in the queries you post but isnt aware of how these queries work, where do you put the query and what software do you need to get it to work.

Thanks.

Alan

[AirNav Support]

Evanelpus,

What we do after the summer or winter schedules begin is to clean our routes database so its empty. Then any route look ups from our users lookup at FlightStats and few other sources we have for the latest route. This is written to our database and any further look ups just use the database data if it has data otherwise it looks up using FlightStats and other sources.

[tarbat]

For someone who is very interested in the queries you post but isnt aware of how these queries work, where do you put the query and what software do you need to get it to work.

I use SQLite Maestro.
1. Open the Yahoo groups routes database.
2. Run the query, and export to XML.
3. Open the navdata.db3 database.
4. Empty the routes table.
4. Import the XML file to the routes table.

I do this on a regular basis, and currently have 60,000+ routes.  Of course I can't vouch for the accuracy of the Yahoo groups database, but I've never spotted any obvious errors.

[Runway 31]

Thanks Chris,

I will give it a go.

Alan

[Chris11]

There is a Yahoo group with a routes database?

[tarbat]

There is a Yahoo group with a routes database?

Yes - goto the files section at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PP-logs-and-routes/

[Evanelpus]

Evanelpus,

What we do after the summer or winter schedules begin is to clean our routes database so its empty. Then any route look ups from our users lookup at FlightStats and few other sources we have for the latest route. This is written to our database and any further look ups just use the database data if it has data otherwise it looks up using FlightStats and other sources.

I think I understand this!

The summer schedules have been in place for a while now and I was wondering when Air Nav hope to have a definative route database in place for the summer schedules?

[AirNav Support]

We haven't done the refresh yet as mentioned in our 1st post on this thread, we hope to do in a few weeks which should pick up fresh data.

As other people have noticed there are some gaps in summer schedule data at many sites at the moment. The task of getting full schedules with the added complexity of alpha numeric routes is not easy.

[Pinza]

Hi Tarbart,

Just spent a couple of hours playing with your advice posted on May 4th.

Dowloaded and installed SQLite Maestro.

Joined relevant Yahoo group and downloaded latest Routes database.

Fired up SQLite Maestro (30 day trial) and managed to open Yahoo group database.

Initially only showed 1000 routes, but then found option to show all records - 'fetched' an impressive 60214 routes.

Obviously along the right lines, so far, but when I try to run your query I run into problems:

I get the error message attached (hopefully) below?

Cut & pasted your query - so shouldn;t be any typos...

Appreciate this is a forum for AirNAv rather than SQLMaestro, but any help much appreciated!

Chris

[Chris11]

Wait for this weekends update to the pp-logs update - I have heard there will be a large update