PDF manuals

Download airplane-flying-handbook.moca from the latest release: about 600 KB, because it cites the PDFs by their FAA links rather than carrying them.

A package built with moca-convert from the 19 PDFs of the FAA’s Airplane Flying Handbook (FAA-H-8083-3C): its 18 chapters and its glossary, about 270 MB of PDF and 370 pages. Nothing in it was written by hand.

capture/pdfs.json lists the PDFs in order, with each one’s title, the URL the FAA publishes it at, and its SHA-256. The PDFs themselves are not in the repository; scripts/fetch-pdfs.mjs downloads them next to it.
airplane-flying-handbook/ is the package: 251 nodes, one per section of a chapter or letter of the glossary, about 210,000 words. Each chapter has an index.md listing its sections, and structure.ttl keeps the chapters in order (skos:OrderedCollection), makes each section a part of its chapter (dcterms:hasPart), and binds every node to its section with moca.concepts.

What it shows:

Large source documents split for retrieval. Sections are found from the PDFs’ type: 18pt handbook title, 14pt chapter, 12pt sections (a node each), and bold run-in subheadings, which stay inside the node as ## headings for moca-index --chunk headings.
Page evidence. Each node cites every PDF page it came from as an RFC 3778 fragment (page=6), noting the page number printed on it (p. 4-6), and its resource opens the PDF at its first page.
Evidence that stays with the publisher. The PDFs are cited by their FAA URLs (--sources link) rather than carried in the package, so the package is located-evidence but not self-contained-evidence. Converted with the default --sources copy, the same package would carry the PDFs under sources/ and be self-contained, at 270 MB.

Tables and diagrams come through as the text they contain; the figures themselves stay in the PDFs, and each keeps its caption.

Regenerating

From the repository root, with Node 22 or later:

node scripts/fetch-pdfs.mjs examples/pdf/capture

npx @openmoca/moca-convert examples/pdf/capture \
  -o examples/pdf/airplane-flying-handbook \
  --id https://example.com/moca/pdf/airplane-flying-handbook \
  --language en --sources link --force

The fetch checks every download against its pinned SHA-256, and so does the conversion, so the same PDFs always give a byte-identical package. When the FAA revises a chapter, the fetch fails for it: download it again and update its sha256 (fetch-pdfs.mjs --pin records the digest of any document that has none).

To search it with a sidecar index:

npx @openmoca/moca-index build examples/pdf/airplane-flying-handbook \
  -o afh.moca.idx --chunk headings

Attribution

Airplane Flying Handbook (FAA-H-8083-3C), U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration, Flight Standards Service, published at https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/airplane_handbook. It is a work of the United States Government and is not subject to copyright in the United States (17 U.S.C. § 105). The text here is extracted from it unchanged apart from layout. The FAA is not affiliated with MOCA and does not endorse it.

Try it

Search and cite this package in your browser on Try OpenMOCA, with no account.

To try it with your AI assistant, use our MCP server. Download airplane-flying-handbook.moca into one folder, and serve the folder:

moca-mcp --library .

One download with nothing to install, for Windows, macOS or Linux: get moca-mcp.

Connect it to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, VS Code or Cursor, with full paths, as in Got a .moca file?. Then ask: “How should a pilot fly a crosswind approach and landing? Cite the handbook page.”