AI Traffic: Difference between revisions

=== Getting good reference material ===

The first step in preparation of creating a ground network consists of getting some reference material. Ideally, You'd like to find a good satellite or aerial image. If you can't find that, using a schematic diagram might also work. For airports in the United States, you can simply load USGS imagery by clicking the "USGS" button, however, for the rest of the world, this service is not available. Perhaps the best way to get a decent reference image is to use the standalone GoogleEarth program. GoogleEarth lets you zoom in to any location of the world. Center your view on the airport, and zoom to encompass the entire area. Then, save a jpg snapshot of the screen. This image can be imported in TaxiDraw. After importing, right click, goto the "lock layers" submenu and unselect the background image. Next, select the background image, right click and select the "calibrate background image". Typically, the "Uniform scale / rotation option" works best.

 

Although a google earth snapshot will usually give a good reference for the actual location of airport parkings, it still doesn't give much information about some of the logical aspects of the parking infrastructure. In particular, information about gate names / airline operations is not provided. Typically, this information is hard to find, but can be compiled from various sources, including wikipedia, random airport diagrams published on the net, in flight airline magazines, etc. etc. In other words, be creative!