Airfields, Airbases & Heliports

Summary: Finding airfields, airbases, heliports and ranges on the map, and reading their frequency, weather, airport and NOTAM information.

Switch on the Airfields layer to see airfields, military airbases, heliports, and ranges plotted on the map, drawn from the plugin’s own location database. Use the built-in search box to jump straight to a specific location by name — or by frequency, which lists every site using it.

Frequencies, Weather, Airport & NOTAMs

Click any airfield marker to open its info popup. Sites with a known ICAO code get four tabs:

• Freqs – a table of the radio frequencies associated with that site (tower, approach, ground, etc., where known). Under each row two muted lines say what the service is and who talks on it (“Controls the runway and the circuit: take-off and landing clearances…”, “A recorded broadcast, repeated on a loop… Nobody talks back to it”) and the band and mode to listen with (“VHF airband, AM”, “UHF military airband, AM”). In Squawker PC each row gains a Tune button and the table a Scan these button — see Tune, Track and Scan These.
• Weather – the current METAR decoded in full (wind with any variable range, visibility in metres, runway visual range, cloud, recent weather, temperature/dew point, QNH and the trend), a flight-category badge (VFR/MVFR/IFR/LIFR), the TAF decoded period by period (“From Wed 18:00Z”, “30% chance, temporarily Thu 00:00Z to 03:00Z”) with the conditions in words, and the likely runway in use. The raw METAR and TAF stay under folds.
• Airport – IATA code, elevation, whether the tower is manned, first and last light for the day (civil twilight, not just sunrise/sunset), a runway table (length, width, surface), and the Movements board below.
• NOTAMs – any currently active NOTAMs specific to that aerodrome, pulled live from the NOTAMs feed and shown in plain language with the message as issued under a fold, so you can see relevant notices without switching to the full NOTAMs layer.

Sites without an ICAO code – many ranges and smaller strips – get a plain frequencies popup instead, since there’s no schedule, weather, or NOTAM feed to attach to them.

Estimated Runway in Use

The Weather tab shows a “Runway” row alongside the METAR – its best guess at which runway is in use, worked out by matching the current wind direction against that airfield’s own runway alignments (aircraft take off and land into wind, so the runway giving the strongest headwind is the likely one). It only appears once both the Weather and Airport tabs have loaded, since it needs data from both.

It’s an estimate based on wind alone, not a live ATC feed, so it won’t reflect noise-preferential routing, a runway closure, or ATC choosing otherwise. When the wind is calm or variable it shows “any” rather than guessing, and if the airfield hasn’t published its runway alignments it shows “-“.

The Movements Board

The Airport tab includes a Movements board for the next three hours, split into Departures and Arrivals sub-tabs. Each row shows the scheduled time (with a revised time alongside it if the flight has been delayed), the flight number and airline, the destination or origin, and a colour-coded status (boarding, delayed, cancelled, departed/landed).

Where the airport publishes it, a line under the destination adds terminal, gate, check-in desk, baggage belt and runway. How much of that you see depends entirely on the airport rather than the flight – Stansted publishes a gate for almost every departure and Heathrow for none, baggage belts only ever appear at Heathrow, and Edinburgh publishes neither terminal nor gate. A row simply shows whatever that airport has given for it.

Smaller general-aviation airfields, most military airbases, and ranges have no scheduled-movements feed at all – the board says so rather than showing an empty list.

Want more than three hours, or the ability to filter and search? Click Full board at the top of the Movements section – see Airport Information – The Full Departures & Arrivals Board.