Syncing the NZ AIP into Air Nav Pro

So I wanted to be lazy and not worry about manually updating the aerodrome charts in Air Nav Pro.
Since there doesn’t seem to be an API in the NZAIP (www.aip.net.nz) I hacked together a python script to scrape the data and download all the plates. I’ve excluded downloading any IFR plates (using a crude word filter) since I’m only interested in VFR. If you want the IFR plates as well, just make the IFR_Keywords list an empty list in getaip.py:
IFR_Keywords = []

I’m running OS X 10.8 so if you want to run these scripts on windows you’ll need to install python at the very least and also rsync.

First I create a list of aerodrome objects and attach a list of assets to each aerodrome object. Each asset is essentially a linked pdf from the AIP web site. Then I create my required directory structure – directory name is the aerodrome ICAO code (for Air Nav Pro) and change the pdf file name to match the required naming convention (must start with ICAO code of aerodrome).
I essentially download all plates every time, since I don’t know which ones have changed.

The two python files need to be in the same directory. You can download all the plates just by running `python getaip.py`
This will create a directory named ‘aip’ in the same directory as the getaip.py script.

You need to mount the web dav server from Air Nav Pro.

Once this is done, then I just use rsync (with the –checksum and –delete) flags to update the plates – the script outputs a sample rsync command. Simple!!

Download the Python Files (Updated to support the Disclaimer page)

Leave a Reply