Hello all,

FlightGear's "Tower" view at my local airport (Melbourne's Tullamarine, 
YMML) is about 300 metres from the actual location of the air traffic 
control tower. I would like to change the Tower View's "From" location 
to correspond to the actual location of the tower.

I thought I could do this easily by editing the apt.dat.gz file in 
FlightGear's ~/Airports/ directory. I gunzip-ed, edited, and gzip-ed the 
file, and updated the "14" record for YMML as follows:
14 -37.669465  144.830636    0 0 ATC Tower

(These coordinates were obtained from Google Earth.)

However, when I run FlightGear the view location of the "Tower" view is 
unchanged. When I browse the internal properties, I find the following 
values:
/sim/tower/airport-id='YMML'
/sim/tower/altitude-ft='483'
/sim/tower/latitude-deg='-37.66919517'
/sim/tower/longitude-deg='144.8451658'

Obviously these values do not correspond with those I have inserted into 
apt.dat.gz.  Where does FlightGear obtain these values?

The "altitude-ft" parameter is curious.  According to this site
http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/aboutus/facilities/towers/melbournetower.asp

...the cabin is 120 feet (about 37 metres) above ground. Where does 
FlightGear get its "483 feet" value? What is the datum for this number?

Does FlightGear make use of the apt.dat.gz file to initialise its 
airport data?  If not, what is this file used for?

Regards,
Greg Hawkes

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