As I’ve mentioned before, I’m often frustrated at the lack of freely-available data for Canadian airports and airspace (and stung by the irony that most of what is available comes from the U.S.). Over the past couple of years, I’ve repeatedly started trying to put data for all airports in the Canada Flight Supplement (CFS) into an XML file or spreadsheet, but have always either given up or ran out of time before the next CFS cycle came out.

As a result, I am happy to report that someone else has succeeded where I failed. George Plews, of North Battleford SK, has managed to get all of the airports, ICAO identifiers, latitudes, and longitudes from the CFS into an excel spreadsheet, and also has it available for viewing on the web on his page Airports in Canada, together with lots of totals and statistics (for example, Ontario has 218 airports, while PEI has 4). Give his page a visit or grab the spreadsheet. Maybe the rest of us can find a way to contribute to make the spreadsheet more useful; at very least, people could commit to scanning part of the CFS each cycle for change bars, so that George can keep is spreadsheet up to date without redoing the whole thing. It would also be nice to add altitudes for the airports. Then there’s the runway data …