Approach Plates

[Ragtopjohnny]

I know we can get approach plates for with in the US at sites like myairplane.com and things like that, but does anyone know of any good sites to get international approach plates? I'm planning on recreating a flight I read about in Plane and Pilot and am looking to do for such charts since part of it will be through out Mexico and South America.

Thanks in advance!

[xxmikexx]

Ragtopjohnny,

I strongly recommend SimPlatesX, which you can buy from the developer, Dauntless-soft.com. (Get the DVD.) It contains 30,000 world wide approach plates, airport diagrams, SIDs, STARs, etc, in a clean-printing pdf-like format. For roughly $45 US you can avoid all the brain damage associated with trying to track this stuff down.

I own it, I love it, and webmaster Nels Anderson reviewed it here ...

http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=m...view/simpx.htm

Note that this is not a Pilot Shop product though I've asked them to consider carrying it.

[jdk2]

Though not the best or easiest to use, it's free and contains a great deal of links to real world sites: http://charts.vatsim.net/

[Ragtopjohnny]

Thanks Guys - Jim - I think I found what I needed with your link - thanks for the help!

[Tim_A]

http://www.eurocontrol.int/aim/publi...is_online.html has links to every country's AIP (Air Information Publication), which includes airport digrams and approach plates. The plates are found in the AIP under the section 'Aerodromes'.

[Ragtopjohnny]

Thanks Tim - I'll look into this one too....

[Tim_A]

Eurocontrol are the "bad guys" of European air navigation, since they send out the invoices for en-route fees (you can be sure they won't lose your flight plan!). But they do have some good things going for them too...

[xxmikexx]

Folks,

Before SimPlatesX I laboriously downloaded free airport diagram after free SID after free IAP and so on. If you feel that your time is worth nothing, or if there are only a few charts you care about, then downloading is the way to go, unless the portal sites like AirNav are being choked by the traffic at the government chart sites so that you can't grab the chart when you need it most -- while you're online to Avsim.

But if you value your time at, say, even as little as $1.00 US per hour, and if you do any significant amount of IFR cross country, then no matter where you are in the world you should consider SimPlatesX.

You get what you pay for. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm telling you what's out there and I'm telling you what I do and why I do it.

[Ragtopjohnny]

I'll have to take a look into those as well. I like to have something where I don't have to hunt and peck around - true - it takes a while sometimes to download, load up the sim, then do FS Live Traffic, then do Active Sky X, then wait for Tile Proxy - It may seem you might be right Mike.

Sigggggggggghhhhhh! Whatever happened to the good ol' days of just loading up a flight?

[Tim_A]

It's all part of Proper Planning... Besides, I like to know a bit about the places I'm flying -- their airspace structure, what the transition altitude is, ATC services available, does the semi-circle rule work East-West, or North-South etc, and that's all easily accessible from the AIP. The down side is that you soon discover how poor the sim is at replicating these things (global 'flight following, TA at 18000ft everywhere, no Class A etc <shudder>)

Of course, you might not care about such things, or care about having out of date charts (after all, FS is itself 3 years out of date), in which case SimPlates is a good product -- something usable, always to hand.