I am thinking about buying the upcoming Aerosoft Airbus 318 and PFPX to plan my flights. This means I also have to buy an updated AIRAC so both addons will have the same data. I've updated an AIRAC only once before, with the 737NGX, but that's a long time ago already. P3D is still using the FSX data for runways, ILS, etc. do by now that data is 8 years old... A lot of things have changed (runway numbers, new runways, new approaches) and after doing a few searches about this I found out I may need new AFCADs for various airports if I want to be sure the runway I plan to land on is actually there...!

 

Now the AVSIM library has AFCADs but the FSX ones need to be edited (?) and so I searched in the P3D section but I couldn't find a single file there (and I couldn't find a browse option). Then I started to wonder why there isn't an addon that keeps your AFCADs up to date with the newest AIRAC. Afaik there isn't such an addon. Wouldn't that be a good idea...? Or am I missing something here...? Seems to me it would be great that if you get a new AIRAC you can also download new AFCADs for every airport that has changed.

 

Anyway, I also ask about this because I am curious how you guys deal with new AIRACs in a sim that's based on 8 year old data... Do you 'simply' download every available P3D AFCAD update? (And btw do those also contain ILS updates etc.?)

I also wonder what this means for the future: at one moment the P3D default data really will have become TOO old and maybe even unusuable?

I suggest that anyone who really needs up-to-date AIRAC data will pay for it commercially as and when  they need it.  I also doubt that anyone will need update AIRAC data for every one of the 27,000+ airfields.  in the end, the market will provide.

We update only the airports that are actually going to be used in the trainer. We don't update the global nav data... we have our own custom data that has far, far more detailed information than even the base sim's nav info has.