Does anyone understand why some airports that are open in real life show up as closed in the sim? I.e., no open runways, runways marked with yellow crosses, shown as closed in Little Navmap, and so on.
Two examples I stumbled upon right now are LIMP, Parma, Italy, and LIPR, Rimini, Italy (in the case of LIPR the airport is open but the only runway is closed). They seem to be open in real life and they are open when using Navigraph data.
Wonder if something maybe went wrong when importing Navblue data or if somehow some NOTAM that was only valid for a few hours ended up “closing” the airport in the sim for a full Sim Upgrade cycle…
No it’s not closed in the aerial images. That would be odd anyway if the database data is sourced from the images, would be difficult to even make that work.
Actually there is a dependency where the aerial images determine what runways are available/oriented. Even if the airport might have had construction/physical changes and the AIRAC might finally reflect that (not necessarily - even country updates to AIRAC can be slow depending upon the nation-state’s agency), the images are paramount. So if an airfield has had a new runway built for SE-NW and closed an older E-W runway; if the Bing Images still show the only E-W runway, that’s what’s going to be available in the sim. It makes sense because the images derive what happens visually. Correcting those by hand in the hundreds isn’t efficient. That’s from one of the first-party devs by the way, in the course of casual conversations.
But to the actual topic of open and closed - it’s worth double-checking the actual AIRAC to again see if the nation’s reporting agencies filed their updates timely. In some places, it doesn’t, on the order of several months to years. That’s the problem with a clearing house approach - there’s no enforcement of timeliness to updates/SLAs for participant countries/agencies.