Decoding the FAA Active Aircraft File

weirdjim

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weirdjim
The FAA, in their normal infinite wisdom, have produced a file of about 190MB with all registered aircraft in the file. The configuration of the file is right out of Dante's descent into hell.

It appears to be comma delimited, but delimited in a format that makes it a royal witch to decode. I suppose I could goof around with Excel and finally get something that makes sense, but if anybody knows if this has been done before I wouldn't mind parting with a few pieces of paper with old dead presidents on them for a copy.

Or some other method of decoding? I've attached the FAA's method of coding the file on the off chance that somebody has seen something like this before.

THanks,

JIm
 

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  • ardata.pdf
    262.5 KB · Views: 12
Looks like it's several files each with different record formats and record lengths.
 
Got it. Excel special functions got it right away. Strange they would release it as a txt file when it is comma delimited and pretty trivial once you figure out how they did it.

Thanks to all..
 
It's fixed length fields. If you'd like some C++ functions I wrote to decode it, I'll provide them. There's actually two files, one is the registrations (i.e., one line for each N-number) and the other is a list of the FAA aircraft code to what the aircraft really is. I parsed this all out because I wrote a program to print out the year of manufacture so we can check people trying to park in Vintage to see if they are old enough.
 
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