Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

36 leg Achievement
FrigginGuy
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Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by FrigginGuy »

I have been accused from time to time of taking things to the extreme. I don't dispute those accusations. And it is in that vain that I decided to spend a couple free hours last night compiling a list of every single FAA-coded airport in the entire Western US Expansion area! :mrgreen:

The Excel spreadsheet attached includes a listing by state of all airports within the states fully covered by PE now. Additionally, there are 3 sheets named as their ARTCC center which include all the airports in states they partially cover. For example, part of Nebraska is covered by ZDV, and it's that list that includes the airports there. Finally there's a sheet called All, which is just an alphabetical list of all 1190 airport codes.

My primary source for this data was Wikipedia, out of convenience, and so there will probably be errors. (For the states, that is; for partial states, I drew lines around the center boundaries in Skyvector and just typed them down manually. Again, error prone.) Should anyone notice one, feel free to post a correction here. :)

I'm thinking it would be fun to come up with some achievements for the new list of fields; like if you complete an entire state or ARTCC. Of course the ultimate challenge would be to just go down the list of all the airports in alphabetical order, but I realize some people have lives.

Anyway, I'd love to hear thoughts from the community if there's any interest on this! :)
Attachments
PE Airports.xlsx
(640.16 KiB) Downloaded 543 times
Seattle, WA
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kullery
Posts: 398
Joined: Sat Oct 06, 2012 3:13 am
Location: Medina, OH

Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by kullery »

You may want to consider this data source:

https://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_sa ... data_5010/

You can download the entire US database in a single excel file (about 19,500 airports). It includes a great deal of airport specific data and can be filtered by ARTCC, state and many other attributes. It is updated on a regular basis.

The file I downloaded in December lists 2,695 airports in the PE coverage area. This is a primary data source for MyFlightRoute. As of now, I only maintain details on the airports within ZLA plus the primary and bonus fields in the WUS expansion area. In the future, I may integrate all of the airports in the coverage area to support the "Hidden Gem" feature of the Western US Expansion.
Ken Ullery - PPL-SEL, 1G5
stevekirks
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Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by stevekirks »

kullery wrote:In the future, I may integrate all of the airports in the coverage area to support the "Hidden Gem" feature of the Western US Expansion.
Where do I send the check? I love the CRAFT page to construct flights and miss it when I use hidden gems. Nothing like having all of the information in one place...

Steve
Steve Kirks (sKirks on Twitch)
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I invented the Alphabet Challenge, what's your excuse?
Alphabet Challenge
kullery
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Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by kullery »

Steve,
It's on my list. Keith kind of surprised me when he added the "hidden gem" feature. I was ready for the primary and bonus fields but never anticipated what he had in mind for the remainder of the airports in the WUS. Some of the initial data is easy to pull from the FAA facilities database but unfortunately this does not include all of the frequency data, so some of data elements have to be manully sourced which gets prettty tedious.
Ken Ullery - PPL-SEL, 1G5
stevekirks
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Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by stevekirks »

I've got a list using copy/paste from AirNav so I'll start working on it this week. I'll post the drafts here...
Steve Kirks (sKirks on Twitch)
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I invented the Alphabet Challenge, what's your excuse?
Alphabet Challenge
Torbinator
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Joined: Wed Mar 18, 2015 9:21 pm

Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by Torbinator »

Hi guys,

I was curious how far you are in actually mapping it out. I started mapping a set of flights that I planned to share in an attempt to give back to the community as I really enjoyed doing the ZLA version.

I am somewhere around the halfway point through the alphabet. I thought when I have it completed over the next few days, I can share it and others can suggest adjustments. JSnapp had assisted by putting together a great set of simple maps that I'll share as well. It gives a great way to open the area in multiple tabs to make the planning easier to see.

Ron
Torbinator
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Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by Torbinator »

Hello everyone,

As mentioned above, I'm posting the following document and link as a potential candidate for the expansion version of the alphabet challenge. Others may have a totally different set of flights that might work out better than what I have put together. Or, maybe combining it with the work of others will create a nice set of routes to fly

The goals I considered while assembling these routes where the following:
  • 1. Try to sample as much of the expansion region as possible over the 35 flights.

    2. Try to vary the types of terrain experienced during the flights.

    3. Avoid using the same airport twice.

    4. Avoid plotting any routes that double back on themselves (this was a limitation of the confined space in the ZLA area).

    5. Any routes that run parallel should do so for the shortest length possible.

    6. Try to keep the leg lengths reasonable, with the expectation that they will be longer due to the significantly larger coverage area.
I think it's off to a decent start. I feel this set of routes provide a good sampling of most of the region. There is definitely varying terrain among much of the routing, from lower level flat areas, to mountainous areas, to the higher elevation flat regions. The majority of routes run far enough away from one another (and at angles) so that the scenery should look different on every flight. The criss-crossing routes are perpendicular enough that the new angle one flies over it at should give a new perpective of that area. The longest leg was from Y to Z, but should be more than manageable in a light twin. Of course, any planned flights will not follow these lines directly anyway.

The letters Q, X, Y, and Z, among others proved to make the routing quite challenging. However, thankfully Justin Snapp (JSnapp1982) worked his magic and created an excellent set of easy to read maps that filtered the airports (link below) by certain naming and coding criteria. This allowed me to open up several tabs, and provided a visualization of where the airports lay in relation to one another.

The total straight line distances added up to 7,045.1 NM.

Even if these routes are not used, they should make for a fun set of flights... I look forward to everyone's feedback!

See the attached PDF with the airports.

Skyvector link: https://tinyurl.com/zrcuvh8

JSnapp1982's maps: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/7cywem9gdoek ... Pekpa?dl=0
Attachments
PEExpansionAlphabetChallenge.pdf
(71.46 KiB) Downloaded 502 times
kullery
Posts: 398
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Location: Medina, OH

Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by kullery »

Nice job!!!

I'll start looking into cloning the existing Alphabet Challenge reporting page to support a WUS Edition.

EDIT: need to have Tim confirm that PEaware will support all of these destinations
Ken Ullery - PPL-SEL, 1G5
Tim Krajcar
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Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by Tim Krajcar »

kullery wrote:EDIT: need to have Tim confirm that PEaware will support all of these destinations
As long as it's in the PEaware airport database it'll be fine. If you find any missing, email me and let me know :)
Tim Krajcar
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Torbinator
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Re: Alphabet Challenge: WUS Edition

Post by Torbinator »

Tim Krajcar wrote:
kullery wrote:EDIT: need to have Tim confirm that PEaware will support all of these destinations
As long as it's in the PEaware airport database it'll be fine. If you find any missing, email me and let me know :)
I tested and confirmed every airport on the list shows up in the MyFlightRoute.com airport selection option under the CRAFT option. Is that connected with PEaware?
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