Land and Hold Short

OK, the name in the title sucks, but the good news is that OurAirports is now open to community contributions: any member can add a new airport or edit information about an existing one.

How to contribute

When you’re logged into your account (sign up here), you will now see an “edit” tab on every airport page, and an “add a new airport” link at the bottom of the left sidebar.

Think locally

OurAirports has excellent coverage for Canada, the U.S., and Brazil, but even then, we’re missing hundreds or thousands of private, unregistered landing fields. For other countries, the coverage is uneven, and errors and missing information always need correction. Now, if you live in Australia (for example), you can add missing Ozzie airports and correct or add information to existing ones, to make the site more useful for your fellow local pilots.

Checking changes

I’m keeping an individual change history for each airport, and can roll back any changes that look spammy or wrong. An amalgamated list of changes for all airports in inverse chronological order is available on the site-wide change page (also available as an RSS feed), and I’ll be grateful for help watching for any problems. I also plan to add Wikipedia-style watchlists soon, so that you can be alerted about changes on airports that interest you.

Open data

Remember that I won’t hoard your contributions — the site’s full airport list, with data, is available in CVS format for free, Public Domain download, and updated every night.

Unlike airport security …

I plan to keep things simple and open as long as our community is small and there aren’t any serious spam attacks. In the future, I can add moderation, recaptchas, etc. if necessary, but I don’t want to worry too much about problems that don’t actually exist yet.

I’ve expanded my original OurAirports tagging to include all airports of entry and U.S. landing rights airports that I can find under Canadian or U.S. control. You can now use my tag “customs” to find either, for trip planning purposes. Here’s the map zoomed in on the Vancouver/Seattle area, showing only airports where you can clear customs:

Map of customs airports near Vancouver and Seattle

Zoom out and drag to see other parts of Canada and the U.S., or start with the full customs map.

Note that some airports have only seasonal service and/or limited operating hours, and that U.S. “landing rights” airports sometimes charge a fee for customs services. I have not included CANPASS-only airports on the map, because they are available only to pilots who have preregistered in the CANPASS program. I have also excluded unofficial (but frequently-used) customs airports like Maxson Field and Sanderson Field that are located near border crossings.

As I mentioned in a previous post, OurAirports now lets you invent your own tags for airports and view maps of the airports you’ve tagged. This morning, I made a map of 60 of the airports that were part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP):

Map: http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/tags/bcatp/

You can drag the map around and zoom in to see specific areas (Eastern Ontario was especially dense). The map (which is still missing a few airports) shows how much the BCATP shaped aviation in Canada — while it used existing airfields when possible, many of the fields were built specifically for the plan, and most of those are still operational. Some still have original hangar buildings, and many maintain the original triangle of three runways that’s so typical of Canadian airports (often with one extended to handle light jets).

While Canada was chosen because of its safe distance from combat and easy access to fuel, wartime flight training was still a brutal business in the BCATP — you could expect at least one fatality in every class training in planes like the Tiger Moth pictured above. Little RCAF Pennfield Ridge, for example, lost 61 student pilots and instructors during its three or four years of operation as a navigational and operational school.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

In OurAirports, you can now tag airports any way you want, rather than just marking them as visited, and see a map for any tag. Here are two examples:

1. Canadian customs airports of entry (my tag “airport-of-entry”) Update: expanded to include U.S. airports of entry as well
2. Airports where I’ve done an instrument approach in actual IMC (my tag “instrument-approach”)

You have to be logged in to use this feature, then you’ll see a tags option in the right sidebar on each airport page. You can tag airports you’ve visited in different years or flying different planes; airports with good restaurants or flight schools; or anything else you want. Each tag is a single word, or a series of words connected by ‘-’, ‘.’, or ‘_’, e.g. ‘fuel-stop’, ‘club-member’, ‘fees’, etc.

On the TODO list: rename a tag, to export tags to KML (for Google Earth), show most popular tags on each airport page.

OurAirports is getting better at filtering. While the maps still show everything, you can now filter most of the lists to show any of the following:

• active land airports,
• airports with scheduled airline service,
• seaplane bases, or
• everything, including heliports, closed airports, etc.

(I figured there’s no point showing only heliports, since helicopters can land at regular airports as well).

Here’s a list of airports in Western Australia with scheduled airline service, and here’s a list of the closest seaplane bases to Edmonton, Alberta.

When pilots think of an airport, they think of anywhere they can safely and legally land their planes. It might or might not have a a fence, pavement, fuel pumps, or any structures at all (even an outhouse), much less a terminal building with departure gates and a security checkpoint.

When non-pilots think of an airport, they usually think of somewhere they can buy a ticket and get on a plane. Even in a small city, it will usually have an overpriced parking lot, paved runways, an ugly terminal building, fuel trucks, etc. etc.

Have it your way …

I want to make OurAirports useful for both groups of people, so I’ve been scavenging information on the web to flag which of the 33,000+ airports currently in the database have any kind of scheduled airline service (even in a light piston twin). The roughly 3,000 airports that I’ve found with airline service are now flagged in the database, and have a small note at the top of their right sidebars. Soon, I’ll make changes so that people who want to see only airports with airline service can filter out everything else.

This stuff changes all the time, and my sources might not be entirely reliable, so please send me corrections etc.

CSV format change

NB: for anyone using the CSV data export at http://www.ourairports.com/data/airports.csv, the format will be changing as of tomorrow, adding an extra column “scheduled_service” with the value “yes” or “no”. As far as I know, this is the only free, machine-readable dataset with this information available online.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.