4 New Countries available on OFM

As from the next AIRAC cycle, on July 20, 2017, there Will be 4 more countries covered by the OFM maps. These countries are as follows:

• Croatia
• Czech Republic
• Netherlands and
• Poland

This means that a total of 14 countries in Europe are now covered by OFM. We are very pleased with this progress, because it means that we have incorporated into our group people who are able to complete the maintenance of the OFM data. Experience has shown us that it is relatively simple to input the basic data for a country for the first time, but the moer challenging task is related to ensuring that the data is maintained constantly up to date. The 14 countries now covered by the OFM are as follows:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Germany
• Hungary
• Netherlands
• Poland
• Romania
• Slovenia
• Sweden
• Switzerland

The rate at which new countries are added to the OFM not only depends on the availability of competent contributors, but is restricted by the need for their training and supervision. It is best to grow at a moderate speed maintaining a very high quality, rather than sacrificing quality for speed.

Improvements to the basemap

During the past month, a number of small changes have been made to the basemap used by the OFM. These changes, although individually very small, collectively provide significant improvements to the readability of the maps: shadings have been improved to enhance clarity and the positioning and format of the labels has been improved yet again, along with other small improvements.