Airspace
According to Gretchen Burrett, Director of Safety for NATS (and soon to be Group Director, Safety Regulation at the CAA) -
"Infringements into controlled airspace are a serious safety concern for private and commercial pilots. In the complex airspace over the UK, it is imperative that all aircraft respect airspace boundaries so we can all share the sky safely."
The only freely licensed UK airspace data suitable for use with a
moving map display is provided by NATS,
the CAA Rory O'Conor - who personally maintains a file of
UK airspace data on his
website.
Thank you Rory.
Rory's data uses the Tim Newport-Peace airspace format. Because I use his airspace data for my Navplot program I've written some Python software scripts to manipulate data in TNP format. I've also extended these scripts to generate Openair format data.
The scripts don't pretend to be a finished "product." But you may find them useful if you can hack Python and want to play with your own airspace data. Note - it isn't possible to do a direct conversion between TNP and Openair because of differences in the two formats (The TNP format is reasonably well designed - the Openair format isn't.) The scripts will almost certainly require tweaking to give the exact result you want.
Update - January 2010
I said last year that I wasn't going to generate any more OpenAir data - but I've changed my mind! So I'll carry on producing translations from Rory's data for now at least.
Download
Last update - 10 January 2010
I've made a couple of sample translations of Rory's 2009B data. You can also download the conversion software.
Normal yada-yada applies, only for use as background wallpaper, not for navigation, etc, etc.
