Mutley's Hangar - Do-It-Yourself Airport Diagrams

I've gotten in the habit of having hard copies of the airport diagrams for both departure and destination airports whenever I fly a "structured" flight, i.e. something other than just drilling holes in the sky; the kind of flight where I actually know ahead of time where I'm going to end up. I think maybe what led me to that was the vaguely shameful feeling that I would get whenever I had to turn on the progressive taxi option in Flight Simulator. You know the situation -- "... taxi to and hold short of runway 33 Right via taxiways Mike, Alpha 4, Victor, Sierra, Sierra 3, runway 24, Romeo, Tango 1." I hated to do it but sometimes I had no choice but to reach for the "Ladies Aid" by lighting up those hated magenta crutches.

In an effort to avoid that, I began to include hard-copy airport diagrams in my pre-flight planning packets. I make a big production of planning my Cargo Pilot flights in particular. It’s very satisfying to be able to land at a complex, unfamiliar airport at night and make my way to where I need to go without any help.

Unfortunately, good-quality airport diagrams don't always come easily to hand. For most medium and large US airports the NACO site…

…is one-stop (free) shopping for not only airport diagrams, but DPs, STARs, approach plates, and assorted other reference data. For almost anywhere else, however, things are a little more difficult to find.

Oh, sure, there are those little 1 1/4" square graphics in the bottom corner of many approach plates. I've tried scanning them and blowing them up, adding more data when I had it -- entirely unsatisfactory. What to do?

This method was a forehead-slapper when I finally stumbled over it. I’m embarrassed how long it took me, but I realized one day while using AFCAD that a good part of what I needed was staring me in the face. I set out then to try to make serviceable airport diagrams beginning with the AFCAD image of the airport. After a little fooling around I had a good product in a very short time.

The intent of this article is to share with you the methods that I use routinely now to create these diagrams. I should add that if a ready-made one can be found on the web that is a faster and better way to go. Failing that, I think you'll find that this is a relatively painless and workable way to come up with a very acceptable substitute.

The only payware required is Microsoft Flight Simulator in one of its current incarnations -- I'm assuming that if you're reading this you probably already own that. Inkjet printer ink is the most expensive commodity item needed for the diagrams, by far. If you price it out by volume you'll find that it costs about 100 times the going price for good Scotch whiskey. Since whiskey doesn't print very well, I guess we’re stuck with buying the ink cartridges.

For an example, we’ll use KBEH on the shores of Lake Michigan at Benton Harbor. This is the airport where I learned to fly but I’ve been around the sun a few times since then. It lies almost due east across Lake Michigan from Chicago - O’Hare, KORD.

Some things have changed. It was formerly Ross Field, but is now Southwest Michigan Regional. At that time it was a part-time tower airport, with ATC services shutting down at 10:00 PM. It is an uncontrolled field now – the tower was never re-opened after President Reagan fired the striking Air Traffic Controllers in 1981. There were at that time a few scheduled airliner flights per day there, big Convair twins (330s, perhaps?), but now there are none.

So pardon my little trip down memory lane. Off we go to document the place. Follow along with me as we make an airport diagram for Ross Field, erm… I mean Southwest Michigan Regional.

Decide whether you want latitude and longitude lines to show on the diagram. Turn them on or off as desired. (Top-line menu -> View -> Show Lat / Long Grid)

Make a screen capture of the image. Leave AFCAD open at this point; you'll be coming back to it.

Open your photo editor. Paste the image from AFCAD. Rotate the image if necessary for your desired page layout.

Crop the image. Try to maintain an aspect ratio (length vs. width) roughly approximating your page dimensions. It's not necessary to be exact with this, just eyeball it for a rectangle that appears to have roughly the proportions of a piece of printer paper. (below, left - this one’s not exact, but it’s good enough)

Transform the image to black-and-white, and if necessary, adjust contrast and brightness to suppress the background hue from AFCAD. (above, right)

This is a good time to do the first save – I use jpg format. It's OK to use the best resolution available -- file size will not be particularly large. Save often – this is the only reminder.

Capture Airport Information from FS

Open Flight Simulator. Go to the “Create a Flight” menu. Select your airport. "Fly Now" (don't worry about aircraft type, weather or time of day).

Press the “Map” sim-icon. Zoom a couple of clicks, and select the airport. Bring up the text box with the airport information.

Highlight all the text and copy it to the clipboard. You must use Ctrl-C to perform the copy as there is no right-click menu here. Be sure you scroll down to get all of it.

Return to the photo editor. Set the drawing color to black.

The next step is to begin adding the text elements to the diagram. You may have to experiment with font sizes to see what looks appropriate. I find some variation in this from diagram to diagram. Good starting values are:

	Description	Font
	ICAO code:	16
	Airport name and city:	12
	Runway numbers:	12
	"N” for North arrow:	12
	Taxiway designators:	10
	Ramp labels:	10
	Other text:	10

... adjust these as necessary to fit the required text into the available spaces as you proceed. Once you have a piece of text placed, drag it around and drop it in the place that is most pleasing to your eye. There are no rules for this.

Note:

Regarding typeface selection, tables and things line up better if you use a fixed-pitch font, but variable-pitch fonts are better if space is tight. This is a judgment call. Common fixed-pitch fonts are the Courier and Lucinda families.

If you want one, this is a good time to add a North arrow. Most photo editors will draw an arrow -- place a short one where you wish (Hmm...do I need to say here that it should point north? No, probably not.). Try to avoid putting it in any large open areas of the diagram; you may need those to fit in blocks of text later. If you wish to use one, put an "N" adjacent to the North arrow.

Place runway numbers at the ends of each runway. Pay attention – this seems a little illogical at first. It’s the reverse of the compass rose. If you’re labelling Rwy 14/32 the “14” goes in the north-west corner and the “32” goes in the south-east.

Return to AFCAD.

From the top-line menu, turn on links and nodes. (View -> Show Nodes, Links, Parking). From the list box in the toolbar, select the taxiways one at a time. As each is selected its center-line will turn red. Using these as a reference, toggle back-and-forth between AFCAD and your diagram in the photo editor and add the taxiway designators.

Note:

I try to keep the font size of the taxiway designators a little smaller than the runway numbers. There tend to be more of them and they sometimes have to be fitted into congested areas of the diagram.

Try to place them so that there is no doubt as to which taxiway each is intended for. It is desirable sometimes to label a taxiway in several locations (see A). As a last resort the designator can be placed in a clear spot and an arrow used to point to the referenced taxiway; I try to avoid this if possible.

Put the ICAO code at the top right corner.

Add the airport name, and the city and country just below the ICAO code. Some of this can be copied in from the data you already have in Notepad, but usually not the city and country. If you don’t know it, you can get this from the Airport menu in Flight Simulator or from the web.

Return to Notepad. The remaining text we still need from here tends to be in three logical blocks -- 1) latitude, longitude and elevation, 2) radio frequencies, and, 3) runway table. I try to place each of these into the airport diagram as a separate piece, fitting them where they go best.

Note: Usually it is necessary to reformat the blocks of text so they will fit into the available areas of the diagram. It is easiest to do so before copying it out of Notepad. For instance, there are many extraneous spaces after the colons in the first two blocks of text that can be deleted to narrow the entire block, and some of the labels can be shortened.

Also, you sometimes need to split the runway table into ILS runways and the others. ILS runways have data in all of the columns – the others do not. The latter can be compressed into a much narrower table that may fit in an otherwise unusable area of the diagram. If space is an issue, break out the non-ILS runways into a separate table using only the runway number, length and surface type columns. If the table is still too large you can compress it by changing “Runway” to “Rwy”, “Length” to “Lgth”, “Surface to “Surf” or “Sfc” and delete spaces to bring the columns into line.


Notepad data before editing	Notepad data after editing

Format each of the blocks and copy and paste them into the diagram where they will fit best. Play with font size if you need to here.

If you wish to, label the ramps with “GA”, “Commercial”, “Cargo”, “Military” or any other designators you might care to use. You can usually discern this by examining the parking spots in AFCAD.

CONCLUSION

With some practice, you can easily knock one of these out in about 15 minutes. This one had a few quirks. It happened to have the long axis lying East-West, so had to be rotated to fit my portrait format.

If I hadn’t cropped quite so closely at the Rwy 27 approach end (top) I’d have had room to put the ILS Runway table across the top and thus could have used a larger font size.

In this diagram I could have kept the runway table in one piece as there was plenty of room for it, but I split it out to show how I do that. I kept the Non-ILS runway table in the same size font as the ILS table for appearance sake, but there was plenty of room for the Non-ILS data to be in a considerably larger font.

If you intend to share your diagram, or even think you might, do yourself a favour and add a prominent “Not for Real World Navigation” label. It seems incredible that someone might actually use one of these in a real aircraft someday, but stranger things have happened. You can’t protect a fool from himself, but you can prevent his widow's lawyer from making a victim of you too.