By loud request, I’ve added Chicago Meigs, closed a few years ago by Mayor Daley, to OurAirports. As a special honour to the mayor, I’ve also arranged for Meigs to appear when you type “Daley” into the site search box (try “David Miller” also, just for good luck).
The most requested feature for OurAirports has been an ability to distinguish the airports you’ve visited as a pilot from the airports you’ve visited as a passenger. It turned out to be fairly easy to implement. If you’re logged in and you’ve checked the “pilot” box on the signin or member options page you’ll see a drop-down menu at the top of each airport page where you can specify how you’ve visited an airport:
On your personal map page, you can now select (just above the map) to see all the airports you’ve visited, only the airports you’ve visited as a pilot/flight crew, or only the airports you’ve visited as a passenger (or not specified). All of these can be bookmarked. Here are all my airports, the airports I’ve visited as a pilot, and the airports I’ve visited as a passenger.
This isn’t the FAA or Transport Canada, so there are no regulations to fuss over — you get to decide for yourself what constitutes being a pilot (PIC? SIC? taking the yoke for 10 minutes in cruise?) or passenger, or even visiting an airport (maybe just shooting an approach or doing a touch-and-go?).
Changes are never painless once a site has a lot of members. OurAirports members have already clicked the “I’ve been here” checkbox for different airports many thousands of times, and I know that some of you (especially those who’ve entered several hundred airports) would not appreciate having to go back to all of them and enter “pilot” manually, so here’s what I did: if (and only if) you checked that you are a pilot, I automatically set the role of all the airports you’ve visited as “pilot” — that way, you have to go back and change only the ones that you visited as a passenger (airline, GA, or even city bus if you like) or as both a passenger and pilot on separate occasions.
Unfortunately, until you make that change, it might look like spinning some grandiose claims, e.g. you’ve flow as pilot not only to Tallgrass Field and Hicksville Regional, but also to Atlanta, Heathrow, JFK, SFO, LAX, and Charles de Gaulle — pretty good for a student pilot in a Cessna 152! If anyone is worried about that, please let me know, and I can reset all of your airports to “unspecified” using a simple database query.
Some time today, while I was in the air over Ottawa taking my 24-month IFR renewal flight test (passed), OurAirports ticked past 100 registered members. People are leaving so many comments that I can barely keep up with reading all of them, and there are many maps I haven’t looked at yet. The personal airports-visited maps I have seen are fascinating — most pilots have clusters around their home airports, with a few further away from long cross countries, but some follow other patterns, like long, east-west lines. A few have made maps of their airline travel, and I plan on giving a way soon to distinguish airports visited as a passenger from airports visited as a pilot.
By the way, the 100th member was MarkAnd, who’s done most of his flying in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. At the time of writing, we have 103 members in total. Thanks to MarkAnd and to everyone else who’s contributed to the site.
(I’ve moved the site to a fast, dedicated server, and the performance problems seem to be over.)
It’s not exactly crazy, but enough people have signed up for OurAirports that I’ve had to do a large amount of emergency coding to keep the site running at an acceptable speed — it’s hosted on a shared cluster (Mosso), a new-fangled kind of service which creates some pretty strange issues around database table writes and locking compared to running on a single host, and you don’t see the problems until a lot of people are trying to do things at the same time. If the site was too slow when you first visited, you might want to take a second look and see if it’s better.
Enough tech talk. You’re here to read about flying, and whether you’re a new student or a 20,000-hour airline pilot, I think you’ll enjoy reading the beautiful comments — mini-essays, really — that OurAirports member XingR has been contributing about his lifetime spent in and around airports on several continents, both in civilian life and through a long military career (he’s currently living near Clark Intl, the former huge U.S. military base in the Phillipines). You can read all of XingR’s comments (in reverse order) on his comments page, and follow the links to see the airports. Thanks, XingR.
I’ve written a web site called OurAirports that lets you make a map of the airports you’ve visited (either as a pilot or as a passenger, your choice). Here’s my personal map — note that you can share your maps with anyone, not just other members:
http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/
To make your own map, set up a free account (takes about 30 seconds), then just click in the “I’ve been here!” box on each airport’s page. You can also browse the airports of the world on The Big Map or drill down geographically. My favourite, though, is warping to a random airport.
This is just a web site, not a startup — sadly, there aren’t enough of us to build a real business out of this. But there’s no point spending any more time on it if the site’s not fun, so if you don’t do anything else please visit the site and let me know what I could do to make it more fun for you as a pilot, airline passenger, GA passenger, etc.
If you feel like helping even more, I’d be grateful if you could show the site to other people who like flying and find out what they think of it. The site lets you leave comments on airports, like AirNav.com does, except that it includes airports outside the U.S. and doesn’t force you to attach comments to a specific FBO. The more comments people leave, the more useful the site is.
Finally, if you’re really hardcore helpful (or you’re stuck in a long layover with nothing else to do), here are some of the things I’m thinking about for the next step, and I’d love to hear people’s preferences:
Let people categorize airport comments (FBO, wifi, fuel, food, ground transpo, etc.) so that it’s easier to find information.
Set up editing and moderation privileges, so that members can add and correct airport (and maybe navaid?) data to keep it current.
Add forums for organizing fly-ins, buying or selling used stuff (tools, GPS, plane, whatever), or even ride boards linked to individual airports, so that you can see what’s going on in your area.
Add navaids, fixes, and basic flight-planning support (draw lines on the map) — this would appeal only to pilots, of course.
Add bulk entry of airports, so that you can just type all the IDs of the airports you’ve visited into a textarea instead of going to each airport page and clicking.
Export airport data in GPX format, so that you can load it into your GPS.
Let members upload GPS tracks to the site, so that they can be displayed on the map and shared with other people.
Add the usual airport data that other sites have (runway lengths, frequencies, etc.)
Try to dig up information on airline schedules and link it to the site.
Give up on the whole idea and do something useful with my free time.
Let me know what you think, and please help me let other pilots know about the site. If you want to send me private email instead of commenting here, my GMail id is david.megginson, and the domain for GMail addresses is gmail.com.