I was going through some old video material I had in my cloud drive to make up for more space when I found this gem of a video. It brought back so many memories including my starts with the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) and how to be able to visualize it using ArcGIS which was the software we had available at my old job. I do not know if this still holds the same in 2021 but nevertheless I think it is interesting for people getting into aeronautical charting about possible ways to ingest these types of files.

Back in 2013 I recall there were several viewers you could use to be able to import the data, AIXM data with the GML component was not so easily and widely available like today as most was using the AIXM 4.5 version but FAA had already some demo data that I downloaded and tried to visualize.

This video is just that, me playing around with an obscure format and trying to get it to play nicely with the GIS software I had available. ArcGIS probably needed the Data Interoperability extension licensing (seems this is no longer the case for GML simple profile features) and I was just starting to get to know QGIS better.

Over the next years we migrated to using Postgis as a backend to store the data and edit with QGIS to then create the Aeronautical Charts using ESRI ArcGIS software because at that time the layout and printing capabilities were not really that good, that is different today.

Anyway here is the video showing how little AIXM has progressed in these years not only in adoption but in visualization capabilities, what I did in 2013 is still relevant today except that now GDAL has better support for many of the GML simple features specific to AIXM like Elevated Points and that QGIS is actually now capable of delivering the same or better aeronautical charts that ESRI products delivered back then.

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