AIRWAYS Entry & the "NOT IN DATABASE" Fix

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📍 Route: EGLL → DVR → KONAN → LFPG (via UL9)⏱ ~5 minutes📊 8 steps🎓 Flight Plans & Routing

The "NOT IN DATABASE" message is the single most common thing to go wrong when entering an airway. Here is why it appears and how to insert UL9 properly.

What this scenario covers

Airways are not entered by typing them into the flight plan directly. The path is a lateral revision on the waypoint where you want to join, which opens the AIRWAYS page, where the airway identifier and the waypoint at which you leave it are entered as a pair. Skip that path and the box has nothing to attach the airway to.

"NOT IN DATABASE" means precisely what it says: the FMGS has no airway by that identifier at that point. Usually the identifier is right but the join point is wrong, or the airway does not actually pass through the waypoint you started the revision from.

Route map for AIRWAYS Entry & the "NOT IN DATABASE" Fix
The EGLL → LFPG route this scenario programs.

How it applies in flight ops

European flight plans are airway-heavy, and a crew loading a route from the OFP is doing this repeatedly and quickly. Being fluent in the LAT REV → AIRWAYS path is the difference between loading a route in two minutes and fighting the box for ten.

The message is also a useful check on the route itself. If the FMGS says an airway is not in the database at a point the OFP claims it is, either the navigation database is out of cycle or the plan is wrong — and both are worth knowing about before departure.

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Step-by-step: AIRWAYS Entry & the "NOT IN DATABASE" Fix

  1. First set up a short route to work with. Type EGLL/LFPG into the scratchpad and press 1R to enter it into the FROM/TO field.

    EGLL is London Heathrow and LFPG is Paris Charles de Gaulle. Once you enter FROM/TO, the FMS builds a skeleton flight plan with a gap — a discontinuity — between the two airports. You close that gap by inserting the airway that connects them.

  2. Press the F-PLN key to open the flight plan.

    The F-PLN page lists your route as a sequence of waypoints. Right now it shows EGLL, a DISCONTINUITY, then LFPG. This is the page you work from to add an airway.

  3. With the scratchpad EMPTY, press 1L — the line key next to EGLL. This opens the LAT REV (lateral revision) page for that waypoint.

    This is the part most tutorials get wrong. On a real A320 you do NOT type an airway straight onto the F-PLN line. You click the waypoint you want to revise FROM, which opens LAT REV — the lateral revision menu for that point. The "click-to-copy" gesture some sims teach does not exist on the real MCDU.

  4. On the LAT REV page, press 5R (AIRWAYS>) to open the AIRWAYS page.

    LAT REV is the menu for lateral changes from a waypoint: departures, arrivals, holds, new destination — and AIRWAYS. The AIRWAYS page is where you string airways together to build the enroute portion of your flight plan.

  5. Now let's reproduce the error everyone hits. Type UL90 (a deliberate typo) into the scratchpad and press 1L. The MCDU rejects it with NOT IN DATA BASE.

    NOT IN DATABASE means the FMS navigation database has no airway with that exact name. The cause is almost always one of four things: (1) a typo or wrong letter/number, (2) the airway doesn't actually pass through the waypoint you started from, (3) you typed a waypoint name where an airway name belongs, or (4) the airway genuinely isn't in your AIRAC cycle for that region. It is rarely a bug — it's the FMS protecting you from an invalid route.

  6. The real airway is UL9, not UL90. You don't need to clear the message — just start typing. Type UL9 (it replaces the error text), then press 1L to accept it.

    UL9 is a real upper airway running from the London area across the Channel toward France. Once accepted, the AIRWAYS page previews the airway's waypoints (DVR, KONAN) so you can confirm it before committing it to the flight plan.

  7. Set where you leave the airway. UL9 ends at KONAN — type KONAN into the scratchpad and press 1R to enter it into the TO field.

    The TO waypoint tells the FMS how far along the airway to follow it — UL9 runs DVR → KONAN, so TO is KONAN, not the destination LFPG. With both the AIRWAY (UL9) and TO (KONAN) set, the INSERT prompt appears so you can commit the airway to your route.

  8. Press 6R to INSERT the airway. The FMS adds DVR and KONAN and closes the discontinuity, giving you EGLL → DVR → KONAN → LFPG.

    Inserting an airway auto-populates every intermediate waypoint from the navigation database and removes the gap between EGLL and LFPG. Your enroute path is now continuous. That's the whole airway workflow — and now you know exactly what NOT IN DATABASE means and how to recover from it.

What to take away

  • Airways are inserted via a lateral revision on the joining waypoint, not typed into F-PLN.
  • The AIRWAYS page takes the airway and the waypoint where you leave it, as a pair.
  • "NOT IN DATABASE" usually means the join point is wrong, not the airway.
  • A rejected airway is a signal about the route or the database cycle — do not just retype it.

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Background reading

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