Author
I. Lee Hetherington
(email)
About
Chartfinder is an index of airport instrument procedures and
other charts. In the entry window at the top right, you type in a
list of airport ICAO codes, separated by spaces and/or commas, and
press Enter. These airports will then be represented by folders in
the display area. Clicking on them will open them, allowing you to
drill down into the charts for the airport. The link associated with
the airport name points to the primary airport diagram.
The US procedure index is built from the digital-Terminal Procedures Publication that is updated
every 28 days. The PDF charts themselves reside on the US servers.
The UK procedure index is built from the UK Aeronautical Information Package
(AIP) web site. The charts themselves reside
on the UK servers.
The Australian procedure index is built from the Airservices
Australia Aerodrome & Procedure Charts web site.
29 of the largest Canadian airports have been indexed by hand from
expired charts. Because this data is not readily available on the
web, I cannot automatically index this data periodically to keep up
with current charts. More recent charts may be available via
http://vatcan.org.
If you can point me at other airport charts available online, I may
investigate their inclusion into Chartfinder. I have a
straightforward text file format that can be used to submit chart
indices to be included in Chartfinder with very little effort
on my part. A necessary condition of this is web-accessible PDF
charts, one page per PDF.
Tabbed Browser Recommended
Chartfinder works best with a browser supporting tabbed
browsing such as Firefox or Internet Explorer 7. Chartfinder
is configured to open chart links in their own window. However, both
Firefox and IE7 can be configured to open such links in a new tab
instead. The advantage of using tabs is that you can open a whole
sequence of charts for a given flight and have them all available at
your finger tips via tabs. Even with my browser configured to open
such links in tabs, I still prefer to Ctrl-click on the chart links as
that keeps the Chartfinder window in focus while I am opening
my sequence of charts.
Support
For support, please visit the VATSIM Charts,
Navigation, and Flightplanning forum.
Disclaimer
No guarantees are made as to the accuracy of this data. For this
reason, under no circumstances should data obtained from
Chartfinder be used for real-world navigation.
