Charts and plates — Open Checklists

Charts, plates and airport diagrams

This project links to charts rather than republishing them, and the reason is specific enough to be worth stating plainly.

Why we do not cut our own charts. FAA charts are US Government works, so copyright is not the obstacle — you may freely copy them. The obstacle is liability. US courts have repeatedly treated aeronautical charts as products subject to strict liability rather than as publications, and one appellate court declined to extend that reasoning to a book specifically because a chart is a tool used in navigation. A customised chart that a pilot navigates from is the exact fact pattern of those cases. Every other artifact on this site carries a verification state and a "not approved data" notice; a chart you fly by cannot be made safe with a label.

So this page does the useful part instead: it points you at the official product, which is free, current, and authoritative in a way a re-cut copy could never be.

Official FAA digital products, all free

VFR charts	Sectionals, terminal area charts, helicopter route charts and Grand Canyon charts, as georeferenced GeoTIFF and PDF. 56-day cycle.
Terminal procedures	Approach plates, departure and arrival procedures, and airport diagrams. Search by airport.
Chart Supplement	Formerly the Airport/Facility Directory. The authoritative source for the airport data on this site, and what you should verify frequencies against.
IFR enroute charts	Low and high altitude enroute charts.
NASR subscription	The raw 28-day data behind the airport pages here: airports, runways, frequencies, navaids, fixes and airspace.

Good viewers, none of them ours

SkyVector renders current sectionals in a browser for free and does it well. VFRMap is another. For flight planning with charts on a tablet, the commercial apps are genuinely better than anything this project would build.

What we do instead

Every airport page carries the field data you would otherwise squint at a chart for — frequencies, runway dimensions and surfaces, pattern altitude, field elevation, magnetic variation and which sectional the field appears on — and links straight to the chart and plates for that airport. That is the part structured data does better than an image, and it is the part we can do responsibly.