Your flight has been cancelled....

[Travis]

Reading about all of the cancelled flights and shutdown airports got me to thinking about getting ready for an FSCaptain flight to or from an airport that has been declared closed.

A non-exhaustive list of US/Canadian delays and closures can be found here - www.fly.faa.gov/flyfaa/xmlAirportStatus.jsp

Just now, this is what they're showing. One could take such a list and extrapolate outwards for 100nm or so from any listd airport to presume other fields would be likewise be affected.
  
<AIRPORT_STATUS_INFORMATION>
  <Update_Time>Mon Dec 27 08:17:37 2010 GMT</Update_Time>
  <Dtd_File>http://www.fly.faa.gov/AirportStatus.dtd</Dtd_File>
  <Delay_type>
    <Name>Airport Closures</Name>
      <Airport_Closure_List>
      <Airport>
        <ARPT>BDL</ARPT>
        <Reason>SNOW</Reason>
        <Start>Dec 26 at 10:55 PM EST.</Start>
        <Reopen>Dec 27 at 05:15 AM EST.</Reopen>
      </Airport>
      <Airport>
        <ARPT>CDW</ARPT>
        <Reason>SNOW</Reason>
        <Start>Dec 26 at 06:00 UTC.</Start>
        <Reopen>Dec 27 at 20:10 UTC.</Reopen>
      </Airport>
      <Airport>
        <ARPT>EWR</ARPT>
        <Reason>SNOW</Reason>
        <Start>Dec 26 at 10:03 PM EST.</Start>
        <Reopen>Dec 27 at 06:00 AM EST.</Reopen>
      </Airport>
      <Airport>
        <ARPT>JFK</ARPT>
        <Reason>SNOW</Reason>
        <Start>Dec 26 at 08:17 PM EST.</Start>
        <Reopen>Dec 27 at 05:00 AM EST.</Reopen>
      </Airport>
    </Airport_Closure_List>
  </Delay_type>
</AIRPORT_STATUS_INFORMATION>

Would anyone utilize such an option, or would you prefer to fly where you want when you want?

[kelvyn]

Travis,

Not a bad idea for an implementation. Sure will add and extra layer of realism by not allowing you to fly to a closed airport, in matter fact... it gives you the airport but is "marked" closed.

[tvieno]

But what about airports outside the US or the smaller ones? I went to that page you linked and it only showed the biggest airports as now. Perhaps base it off of the METAR, if there is +SN in the METAR, that would trigger a shutdown.

Even better yet, based on the airport's size, the smaller single strip ones would close at -SN because they outsource their ground maintenance. The medium sized ones, at just SN and the largest would have to have +SN.

[Travis]

I found that data feed a few weeks ago and have been checking it every so often to see what's up. I've just noticed that MMSD is listed in the Ground Stop area for "Seasonal Demand Volume" so - like Ground Delays for fog, etc. - it could be used for more than just closures.

I've looked for public non-North American data sources but haven't found any. (I did consider something like FlightAware, but that would still be North America focused.) Governmental sources would be better used than commercial ones, but contra that, anything would be better than nothing.

METAR-based events might be better used to implement delays since METARs don't consider even recent history. Then again, a METAR-tracking service might be just the ticket there....

[Aviator992]

I like it!

[Travis]

Thx all... just something to consider for post-1.2.0 frivolities.

Sometime over the next couple of weeks/months I might try my hand at writing a METAR collecting/tracking service that would hold a few day's worth of "crummy weather conditions" that might be used to consider the state of a given airport just to see what might be feasible.

For example in the past few days JFK had 3 hrs of light snow, followed by 2 hrs of "normal" snow and then 5 hrs of alternating "regular" and heavy snow before it was closed. Then there were 10 hours of steady snow, with no recorded snow for the past 10 hours or so... and the last time I looked JFK was scheduled to reopen within the hour.

But then JFK might just be a "super" airport in this regard and only 2 hours of flurries at Podunk Florida International might bring things to a screeching halt for a whole day.

Something similar-yet-different that caught my attention recently was the reports that some major EU airports were running low on de-icing fluid and were expecting delays based on that. Wow.