Comments on: Calling all geo-geeks!

By: david

david — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:19:55 +0000

Thanks, Ross and Ed. I found that Wikipedia has already answered my question in excruciating detail, and it's a mess — not only do many countries and even subdivisions overlap continents, but there's not always full agreement on what continents some areas belong to. The enclaves and other foreign territories aren't always a problem, because many of them have their own ISO 3166 codes, so OurAirports treats them as separate countries. Here are some examples:

Melilla and the Canary Islands don't have a separate code from Spain, however, so those need to be dealt with. When a country has a military base on another country's territory (hostile or otherwise), I assign the base to the host country, so Leeward Point Field at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station is assigned to Cuba, even though the U.S. controls the field, and RAF Akrotiri is assigned to Cyprus.

By: Ed Davies

Ed Davies — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 13:03:35 +0000

How can a Canadian forget LFVP?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Pierre_Airport

By: Ross

Ross — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 12:15:52 +0000

What about exclaves and dependent territories? Britain has dependent islands all over the shop, including Mount Pleasant in the Falkland Islands which sports a UK ICAO code (EGYP) and has a small scheduled service. Spain has two cities in North Africa (Ceuta and Melilla), the latter of which has an airport (though its ICAO code, GEML, is correct for NW Africa). Don’t forget NZSP, either ;)