Howto:Make a helipad
The current FlightGear world has little helipads to fly from/to with your helicopter. This article is meant to provide help in the progress of making a helipad.
Creating the model
Every face in FlightGear is solid and can be landed on by default, so helipads can be modeled just like any other object.
Editing apt.dat
Right now your helipad can be landed on, but we do like to takeoff from it aswell, don't we? Therefore, we need to add two lines to the apt.dat file, which stores all airport information. You can find it likely in $FG_ROOT/Airports. Before we can edit the file we need to unzip it first.
As an example, the lines below are used for the helipad on the roof of a large hospital in the Netherlands (see image).
17 126 0 0 EH0001 [H] VU medisch centrum
10 52.33434 4.85911 H1x 360.00 40 0000.0000 0000.0000 36 111111 1 0 2 0.25 0 0300.0300
Now, let us take a closer look at these two lines.
Code | Function |
---|---|
17 | Defines this as a heliport. |
126 | Elevation above MSL. |
0 | No control tower available. |
0 | No default buildings. |
EH0001 | The ICAO code of the helideck. |
Code | Function |
---|---|
10 | Defines this as runway (in this case helipad). |
52.33434 | Latitude of helipad. |
4.85911 | Longitude of helipad. |
H1x | Runway number (in this casehelipad number). |
360.00 | Runway heading (true). |
40 | Length of runway (in this case helideck) in feet. |
36 | Width of runway, also in feet. |
In the airport list of FGrun it will appear as EH0001, VU medisch centrum [H] with runway H1.
If you want your helipad to be included with a further FlightGear release, make sure to send your change/addition to apt.dat to http://data.x-plane.com/ and upload your model to the FlightGear Scenery Database.