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MSFS20 Need ideas/brainstorming - reasonable ICAO-Codes for airports without ICAO-Code

I

ian727

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germany
Hello community!

Yep, FS2020 is out and I successfully found my way back here... :)

In my FS time and the time I spend playing around and creating stuff for the FS, I am mainly busy in Africa, the South-Western/Central part in particular. Not an area that gets much attention... ...as you can easily see when you check some airfields in the Congo.

I can't really figure out what the heck Microsoft did here, but it seems like they imported Airport data from OpenStreetMap - which is, first of all, a really cool thing. As I am also part of the OSM community, I even flew at some airstrips that I personally added to OSM in the Congo (I worked there in a very remote area for some months).
However, after having imported the OSM Airport data, the cool stuff ends: They apparently only used the airport position, not the name and not the ICAO-Code. Instead, they assigned the name of a nearby airport (or city?) and added a fictional ICAO-Code. You can see the resulting mess: There are like 20 airports in the FS called "Kikwit" (while in reality, there is only one) and the ICAOs in the Congo are one big mess. You need to know that in Congo, many of these super small airstrips don't have an ICAO-Code at all. And in the official ICAO documents for the Congo you will still find Airports that have been closed/abandoned/overgrown since more than 40 years.

Yep, pretty messy. So I decided to slowly start correcting all that stuff, starting in parts of the country I am most familiar with. Now - the thing is, there are about 700 airstrips in the Congo. That high number is explained by the basically non-existent road infrastructure. Though, most of those airfields are not maintained, it is only when arrivals are announced that they are prepared for a landing (by cutting away the vegetation and filling in some holes).

But what kind of ICAO should be assigned to them? I first thought of FZ01, FZ02 and so on (FZ being the letters assigned to Congo) but that would only leave room for 99 airfields - and I need, optimistically speaking, about 400-500 - at least in the long run. I assume there are people here who already created scenery of airports that did not have an ICAO-Code. What did you assign? How to keep some order when creating multiple airports in one country that do not have ICAO-Codes?

Curious for your ideas,

ian727
 
Hi Ian, They've done it the world over, assigning ICAO's unused ICAO's to strips that would never have them. One approach might be to come up with an alpha numeric 2 digit code for each country and then assign the next 2 characters in sequence. The trouble is I don't think there is a way to correct the mess they've made. I think its something they need to fix or we're stuck with it.
 
Bush strips world-wide are maintained on a need-to basis. It would be nice to figure out how to assign some code to replace the ICAO. Or skip that code if not assigned.
 
xr219 said:
Hi Ian, They've done it the world over, assigning ICAO's unused ICAO's to strips that would never have them. One approach might be to come up with an alpha numeric 2 digit code for each country and then assign the next 2 characters in sequence. The trouble is I don't think there is a way to correct the mess they've made. I think its something they need to fix or we're stuck with it.
Click to expand...

Oh man, I guessed that already. Had a quick look at Angola, and yeah, the same mess. Can't believe that. Even the FSX guys did a better job there. Is there a way to modify the stock FS2020 database? Probably not. So it seems like I am stuck with deleting whole airfields and then re-adding them correctly.

rhumbaflappy said:
Bush strips world-wide are maintained on a need-to basis. It would be nice to figure out how to assign some code to replace the ICAO. Or skip that code if not assigned.
Click to expand...

I assume it is not possible to leave the field for ICAO empty, just like in FSX. I can give it a try though. For now I'll just start with FZ01 - and continue until FZ99, and then start thinking again.
 
I tried emptying the field... The compiler throws an error. Looking at the default APX files shows Asobo has indexed all ICAO instances alphabetically according to ICAO. They allow a 3 character identifier (such as c59), so perhaps they will allow a 5 character identifier (such as FL1234), that would allow for 999 airstrips.

EDIT: Success!

You can use a 5 character identifier... perhaps more characters if needed
Success.png


and it does show the new airfield, which is an FSX-ADE based XML!
 
Last edited:
Hey, cool stuff! FZ001 it is, then!

Does anyone have experience excluding a whole airport in FS2020 as stock airport data cannot be modified? Else I'll just give it a try once I get home.
 
Yeah, removing the airport using an exclusion rectangle polygon with excluding attributes did not work. Any ideas?
 

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The spec says that it can take 5 characters. Whether that works or not is a different matter but it might at least be helpful...
 
The only way I found to remove the existing airport was to create the new one with the same ICAO. I’m going to look at the xml later. It might be that we can do it by editing the xml directly.
 
Szpike said:
The spec says that it can take 5 characters. Whether that works or not is a different matter but it might at least be helpful...
Click to expand...
Yep. 5 is the limit. (I would have liked more. 127 characters would have allowed 'FZCONGOBUSH0000' which would have allowed 9999 bush strips in the Congo with a descriptive ID).
 
Dumb question which I genuinely haven't examined or tried... does the String5 type mean 5 ASCII / CP437 characters, or 5 UTF-8 unicode characters...? ;)

(Given BGL parsing seems to be byte-oriented and the problems MSFS seems to have with non-CP437 Windows usernames, I'd assume the former, but who knows nowadays...)
 
I came up with a solution of sorts that will scale globally. If you use the international dialing code for the country followed by a 2 character alpha numeric code that should give you a few thousand codes per country for airfields or strips that are missing.

So for example an airfield in Ireland would be:-
353** (where each * is an alpha numeric character
France would be 33**, UK would be 44** etc

as the dialing code for the USA is 1 the airport code code be 3 characters which would give thousands of combinations.
 
X is unused as a first letter for ICAO codes.

Maybe: X + ISO-3166-1:alpha 2 country code + two characters? Gives you 36 × 36 = 1,296 local codes per country?
 
Could do. I was just thinking of a code that’s an international standard and already exists though.
 
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