Peter,
as you addressed me directly, I am happy to answer.
First, congratulations on 2300 reports.
Although - by your own standard, the number shouldn't impress anyone too much. When you launched this thread in 2020, you dismissed the established databases because - and I quote - "most of the data is really quite old" and old reports are "almost useless". I agree. Which makes recency the only currency that counts.
Your own posts put EuroGA at 2000 last August and 2300 now - roughly 300 added in its sixth year, with thousands of members. Airfield Directory added 970 handwritten reports in the same twelve months, from a standing start - counting one report per pilot per airfield, with the constant stream of updates to existing reports not counted at all. Last month alone: over 70 new ones, plus dozens of refreshed ones. Because our philosophy is that pilots update their report instead of stacking a new one on top, every airfield shows the current state, not an archaeology expedition.
And since we're calling things "real pilot reports, with details": a casual browse through your 2300 turns up entries whose complete text is "Ok", "Nil" or "Good". Those count toward the 2300 too.
Speaking of "details like prices": on Airfield Directory, landing fees and fuel prices don't depend on what a pilot remembered to type into a text box months ago. They come straight from the airfields' own Aerops data (another service that focuses on collaboration for the benefit of the community) - maintained by the airfields themselves, including personalised landing fees and forms e.g. for PPR. As a backup, we publish community prices from another open community project with an open API, aviation-fuel-prices.com, if they're no older than 30 days. So our prices are current by construction, not by luck. Same applies to information like customs/border crossing points, which is fetched and parsed directly from the official sources.
And to calm your AI phobia: not a single AI-generated report has been added beyond the clearly-badged launch set from a year ago. Zero AI texts since launch; pilots wrote 970. By hand. But here is what our AI DOES do: it translates every report into six languages, so a French pilot writes in French and you read it in English - something neither a German-only nor an English-only database offers a pan-European community, which we both value. There's even a human-only-no-AI nightly export.
All that exists precisely because the data in Airfield Directory is open and it belongs to the people who contributed it - the community.
What remains is the actual difference between the projects. For the record: I first invited you to cooperate by personal email in March 2021 - on your terms, even offering to keep EuroGA's data out of the API and download entirely if you preferred. You never replied.
I repeated the offer in this thread last August. It still stands: all our reports are CC BY-SA, with an open API, nightly full export, ForeFlight content packs, and an MCP server for Claude & ChatGPT. You're welcome to integrate every single one into EuroGA, with attribution, today - and you and/or your contributors are equally welcome to republish their own reports with us.
One of these two databases has had a locked door for five years now. It isn't ours.
In the spirit of peaceful coexistence, I returned the courtesy you extended this forum in 2020 and posted an introduction of Airfield Directory on EuroGA. I'm genuinely curious how long it stays up. [UPDATE: Less than 2 minutes.]
