Howto:Make a helipad

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Revision as of 15:57, 12 June 2009 by Gijs (talk | contribs) (New page: thumb|270px|An [[EC135 at the helipad of a large hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.]]The current FlightGear world has little helipads to fly from/to with your...)
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An EC135 at the helipad of a large hospital in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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.