When I presented the AIMIND project which included the ICAO Abbreviations in a machine readable format there was a comment about also doing something for obstacles. PANS AIM Doc 10066 has put a lot of requirements and pieces in place to go digital but we are somehow still waiting to have an Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) 5.1+ database in order to do stuff. Yes of course having the latest and best tools for automation make sense but what if I told you there is a way to start going digital without waiting?

Here enters the obstacle template worksheet I am providing in this case for ENR 5.4, it contains exactly the same content as you are already publishing in paper Aeronautical Information Publication (AIP) or eAIP (PDF or HTML) but it has the added benefit that if you provide this data you do not need to produce (if you want) the section ENR 5.4 and a lot of navigational data houses, performance engineers and instrument flight procedure designers (IFPD) are going to be very happy not to transcribe hundreds of lines with possibilities of errors. Is this AIXM? no Is this perfect? no Is this better than paper and waiting a system? Yes! Other countries are already using this approach like UK NATS and SPAIN ENAIRE

ICAO ENR 5.4 obstacle template

Obstacle_Identifier starts with XX to signal country code and the Designation is not mandatory but a nice to have text name if available. I think the rest of the fields are self explanatory. Worksheet is roughly based in the Data Catalogue but not 100% one-to-one, you can download the worksheet from the AIMIND project and post any issues or feedback there for improvement

Enjoy and Happy going digital!


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