Hi Paul, and welcome aboard! First, thanks for posting this here in the forums. This is exactly what they're for. Chances are if you've got a question, someone else either has the same one now or will in the future, so your post can help other students too.

From what you've shown, I don't think you have too many tables at all. In fact, this is a good start. Country -> State -> City -> Airport is a perfectly reasonable hierarchy if you want to be able to organize and search your data that way. Having separate tables for companies, runway headings, runway surfaces, and so on is exactly the kind of normalization we want to do.

One small naming convention I use personally: for Yes/No fields, I like to start them with "Is", so instead of Paved or Grass, I'd probably use IsPaved and IsGrass. That's just my own preference. It makes those fields read more naturally in code and queries, but it's certainly not a requirement.

The biggest piece of advice I'd give you is don't get too far ahead of yourself just yet. I see you're only up to Beginner 8. I'd recommend finishing the Beginner series and then at least Access Expert 1 and Expert 2 before you spend a lot of time building your database. Those classes cover relationships, normalization, lookup tables, combo boxes, and other topics that will make designing something like this much easier.

For now, keep fleshing out your ideas. It's much easier to adjust a design on paper than after you've entered thousands of records.

Overall, though, I like where you're headed. Keep asking questions here in the forums as they come up, and we'll help you build it the right way. Live long and prosper!

Thanks Richard! Your advice is very good and much appreciated.