The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Sectional Raster Aeronautical Chart series is designed to meet the needs of users who require georeferenced raster images of FAA Visual Flight Rules (VFR) Sectional Aeronautical Charts. An Sectional Raster Aeronautical Chart is a scanned image of an FAA Sectional Aeronautical Chart. All information that is part of the paper Sectional Aeronautical Chart is included in the raster image. The image inside the neat line is georeferenced to the surface of the earth. Georeferencing information for insets should be disregarded. Only the main body of the chart is accurately georeferenced. The raster data may be viewed using a geographical information system to take advantage of the georeferenced nature of the data or the data can be viewed using commonly available image viewing software (Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft PowerPoint, etc.). There are many free geographical information system viewers available, ESRI's ArcExplorer available at
http://www.esri.com/software/arcexplorer/index.html is one example of a free viewer that can downloaded and used to view Sectional Raster Aeronautical Chart files. The United States Geological Survey's free viewer DLGV32 available at
http://mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov/drc/dlgv32pro/ is another fine example of an application available on the web to view geospatial data.
It is recommended that you use a broadband internet connection to reduce download time. Warning: Some Dial-up Internet Service Providers may time-out while downloading large files.
Downloadable charts are in zip format and will need to be uncompressed using an unzip utility.