Land and Hold Short

I’m late on this (sorry, other air-bloggers), but here goes …

5. Expand my horizons. This year, I pushed my southern limit a bit by flying all the way south to Dulles Airport. My other extremes flying from Ottawa are Sault Ste. Marie to the west, Baie Comeau to the north, and Port Hawkesbury (Cape Breton) to the east. Maybe this is the summer I’ll fly up to Hudson Bay, just for the hell of it.

4. Seriously consider taking on one or two partners for my Warrior. It’s a lot of work taking care of an airplane, and it could be fun to share.

3. Ace my IFR renewal and my medical. I did my last medical when I was 39, so it was good for five years. My last IFR flight test was in 2007, and was good for two years. They both come due this summer/fall, and the medical will be every two years from now on (since I’m over 40). Recurrent training will help with the first one, and exercise and healthy eating will help with the second.

2. Don’t get stressed. After around 700 hours, I still get stressed (as in can’t-eat, rush-to-the-bathroom stressed) before almost every flight, especially if I have passengers. Some time between starting the pre-flight and starting the engine, it all melts away. I’d like to enjoy the anticipation of the flight as well as the actual flying.

1. Use the blog test for all my flying decisions. Would I be comfortable blogging tomorrow about my decisions and actions today, without making any excuses, modifications, or omissions? If not, time to come up with a new plan.

Support and encouragement from my friends reading this will be very welcome.

I don’t care that it holds only one person. When can I buy one of these?

190 knots true airspeed at 17,500 feet burning 3.5 gallons per hour — very nice! He can get 50 miles to the gallon at that setting (comparable to an economy car), or 100 miles to the gallon at a more economical power setting (comparable to a motor scooter).

Seasons greetings, fellow geo-geeks! Here’s my problem. Right now, I have organized OurAirports like this:

world : continent *
continent : country *
country : region *
region : airport *

It’s the kind of neat data structure that people like me love, but that never quite works. First of all, not every country is divided into regions (provinces/states/etc.) and I don’t always know what region an airport is in, but I deal with that by adding an “Unassigned” pseudo-region to every country.

More importantly, not every country belongs to a single continent. The most obvious exceptions are Russia and Turkey, both of which span Europe and Asia, but there may be others that I haven’t thought of.

So here are my questions:

1. Are there any countries besides Russia and Turkey that span more than one continent?
2. Are there any subdivisions of the above countries that span more than one continent? For example, does Turkey have a province, or does Russia have an oblast that lies in both Asia and Europe?

I’m trying to figure out if I can link regions to continents, or if I have do have a link from every single airport.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I’ve added a map of members to OurAirports:

http://www.ourairports.com/members/

You can see where members live, and if there are any at airports near you (or near where you plan to travel to). Zoom in to see more members (there are about 750 members in total).

These are based on the home airports specified in members’ profiles. It’s nice to see lots outside North America.

This is going to be some story when we get the details:

Pair aboard downed plane from N.L. found in life-raft off Baffin Island (CBC)

A small plane ditches in the Arctic, just before the start of winter. Both occupants somehow make it into a life raft, and are rescued some time later by a fishing boat. At a very minimum, they must have been wearing survival suits, but I’m not sure even that would be any kind of guarantee. It was -25° C here in Ottawa this morning, and I shudder to think of being out in a life raft for hours and hours in the dark, and even colder temperatures.

Update: The CBC story has more info now. They landed on ice, their plane broke through and sank with their liferaft, and they spent 18 hours stranded on some ice before being picked up. It was only -13C there, quite a bit warmer than Ottawa this morning. They were wearing survival suits.

Yes, Virginia, there are more than 40,000 airports in the world! Thanks to our contributors, OurAirports now lists more than 40,000 airports, heliports, and seaplane bases around the world. That’s a milestone I’ve been watching for ever since I set up the site.

I also think it’s cool that over 5,000 of those airports have actually been visited by at least one OurAirports member — that’s 13% coverage, just from the members of one little web site.

Nearly all of the recent contributions have been for airports outside North America, where public data sources are sparse — we now list over 3,500 airports for Brazil for example (more than Canada), nearly 1,700 for Australia, and 422 for South Africa.

I know there must be lots more out there — a country as large as Russia is unlikely to have only 311 airports, and even the little Falkland Islands are supposed to have a landing strip in every settlement, so we’re missing at least 20-30 strips there.

If you have or can find information, please share. Everything you contribute to OurAirports is free for anyone to use (free as in “beer” and “speech”), and you can download daily data dumps for use in your own projects, so you’re sharing information with the whole community, not locking it up in a single site.