YBOR (Bordertown Australia): Navigraph shows two runways on the actual chart, but the data for YBOR is empty with regards to runway. I’ve encountered quite a few airports in Australia like this in the Navigraph Charts database. I wouldn’t even mention it, but MSFS 2024 Career Mode has a habit of finding the smallest bumf#%& Australia airports possible when you’re early in your career. At least five times now I’ve encountered airports that are IN the chart and IN the Navigraph database as far as name, location, and elevation are concerned, but no runway data. Is this the right forum for reporting these lapses, or is there a better avenue?
Two more airports with no runways: Both the start AND the destination of a MSFS 2024 medium cargo career mission. YINJ (Injune, Australia) & YBLC (Balcanoona, Australia)
P.S. All those airports on the chart that have the ICAO designator followed by the airport name? Those are my custom waypoints for airports used by MSFS 2024 Career Mode that are displayed on the charts, but that have NO information in the Navigraph database. Thus, I can’t use them as proper destinations, but I at least can get the route properly plotted.
Unfortunately, we do not have any runway data for these airports. The runways you see in the map come from OpenStreetMap, and are only there as a fallback - we do not have exact, AIP-based information about these runways.
We looked in the Australian AIP and were unable to find the data there either, which is likely why we don’t have any data. Australian authorities simply haven’t made this information public.
But I understand what you’re saying. It needs to come from the Australian AIP as that is the official airport resource for Australian airports. I’m surprised that Microsoft has these obscure airports in their sim that aren’t even officially recognized by Australian authorities. I wonder what database they got THEIR info from?
I would think Navigraph would have developed a data checker to comb-out airports that had no runways. There’s only two possibilities for such airports: 1.) It’s a heliport, or 2.) It’s the result of an incomplete/corrupted database entry.
Correct! Even then, our data provider would include it - not us. Only then could we provide it in our application.
We could remove these airports altogether. But is it not better to show them without runways than not having them at all? We have considered this before, but the tradeoffs are not straightforward.
It could be that the airport used to be public in the past. Flight simulators have a lot of “legacy” airports that have been there since the 1990s, many of which are now closed IRL but still exist in the sim.
That’s possible, but I don’t think it applies in this case. There were airports in MSFS 2024 Career Mode being used that were closed, but every single one of them had the required yellow X’s on the runway. None of the small strips in Australia are close enough to larger airports to be able to be closed - if only for medevac purposes. And none of the airports were marked with yellow X’s.
Right, but they may have been open to the public at some point, and are now private. Or simply have always been private but included in the sim for completeness’ sake.
MSFS has almost always included non-public airports/runways. Military airbases have been included since almost the subLogic days. I’m flying medium cargo missions in a Grand Caravan, so I could conceivably be going to public, private, or military airstrips for my deliveries. There would be no reason for Australia to NOT track private fields in their AIS directory. The FAA’s Airport/Facilities Directory (back when it was printed regularly) included private fields as well as public and military ones. Australia probably does the same.
