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’ll be giving a short demo of OurAirports at DemoCamp Ottawa 9 next Monday (26 May 2008). Feel free to drop by if you’re in town. It’s at The Velvet Room in the ByWard Market, starting at 7:00 pm.

View Larger Map

I’ve finally gotten around to adding free data downloads to OurAirports. You can now download nightly CSV-formatted data dumps of all the airports, countries, and regions in OurAirports at

http://www.ourairports.com/data/

These will open with most spreadsheet and database programs (make sure you import them as UTF-8).

All data is released into the Public Domain and comes with no warranty. If you have any corrections or additions, please make them in the spreadsheet and then send them back to me.

OurAirports now includes heliports and floatplane bases as well as fixed-wing airports: in the last 24 hours I’ve added 828 floatplane bases and 5,911 heliports, all from Canada and the U.S. (and a couple of U.S. dependencies like Guam).

Here’s a screenshot of a map of the Vancouver area — you should be able to make out 3 floatplane bases, 7 heliports, and 6 airports (you can jump to the live map to explore further):

Thanks again to George Plews for collecting the Canadian data. Does anyone have a good reference for heliports and floatplane bases outside of Canada and the U.S. (or even for more fixed-wing airports)?

Any logged-in member can now add placemarks to the map for local spots at an airport (FBOs, visitor parking, fuel, restaurant, customs, or whatever), and more importantly, anyone — even Anonymous Flyers — can comment on those spots.

Take a look at Ottawa Rockcliffe or Teterboro to see some examples, then mark some of the spots at your local airport so that I’ll know where to park, fuel up, and eat next time I fly in.

Just like Google Maps, OurAirports now has a couple of easy ways to include your personal airport map in a blog posting or web page, YouTube-style:

1. (easy) Click on the “Share this map” link at the top right of the map, then copy and paste the single line of HTML markup into your blog or web page.
2. (slightly more advanced) Use the KML link (also provided) to integrate with Google Earth, Google Maps, or other KML-enabled applications.

Here’s my current pilot map (it might not show up in RSS readers). OurAirports will keep it up to date even after I make my posting:

If you want to make your embedded map a different size, just edit the values of the width and height attributes near the start of the line of HTML.

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:

• As a pilot
• As a passenger
• Both

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?).

Here’s the controversial part…

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.

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.

Gunner William Henry Ranson (born 1843) has started a blog about his life in the ranks of Royal Artillery and as a civilian in Canada right after Confederation:

http://whranson.blogspot.com/

Gunner Ranson was my great-great-grandfather. After serving in the Royal Artillery during the 1860s, he ended up settling in Canada permanently in the 1870s. While many British officers kept diaries and wrote memoirs, very few men of the ranks did — although a good number could read and write, few had the inclination and the available time (and light) to do so — but my great-great-grandfather was an exception. While we don’t have the original diary, we do have a summary that he wrote later in life as a memoir, based on the lost diary, giving a working man’s view of both the British military and of later civilian life (often more brutal) in Victorian Canada.

My brother Tom has had the memoir for some years and has been trying to decide the best way to edit and publish it. In the end, he has decided to publish sections serially as a blog. I encourage anyone interested in British or Canadian history to read this. The blog format reminds me very strongly of the serial magazine publication common during the Victorian period.

[Update: see below.]

According to Snopes, this photo is legit — it’s a Cherokee 180 N6487J that crashed into a tree during a forced approach near Meadowlake Airport in Colorado last month after the engine lost power (the pilot, who was the sole occupant, had no serious injuries).

The picture is circulating around the Internet because of the funny juxtaposition of a flight school sign and a small plane crashed into a tree behind it. However, American Aviation uses Cessnas as its primary trainers (and a Piper Arrow for complex training), and the PA-28-180 in the picture is registered to a real-estate company, so unless it was on a lease-back, it really has nothing to do with the flying school or flying lessons. Still, it is hard not to come up with funny captions …

[Update 2006-11-20: it looks like they've pulled even the small amount of Canadian data that they can get from the FAA database — there's nothing but US airports and navaids in there now.]

Well, the DAFIF — the free database of worldwide aeronautical information that used to be available free from the U.S. Department of Defense — has been gone for a few weeks, and it’s having repercussions that I hadn’t anticipated. It turns out that the most popular flight planning web site, Aeroplanner, was using the DAFIF for their non-U.S. data, so Canada has suddenly gone blank: aside from a few major airports and navaids that happen to be in the FAA database, and the segments of a few airways crossing the border, the airways, intersections, navaids, airports, terminal airspace, control zones, restricted airspace, and everything else that used to crowed their online maps is gone, leaving the site useless for anyone (Canadian or American) planning a flight that doesn’t stay entirely within U.S. airspace. The company graciously offered me a pro-rated refund for my subscription, though I decided not to take them up on it.

Lots of other people use the DAFIF for cheap or free flight planning, for controlling aircraft in flight simulators, and much more. In many cases, they can keep using the last public edition, which will slowly get more and more out of date, but that obviously wouldn’t be a responsible choice for a real-world online flight planning service like Aeroplanner.

Who’s the real villain?

So who should we be mad at? The U.S. DoD is an obvious target, since they’re the ones who pulled the data from public use, but let’s step back and think for a second:

1. In the U.S., the FAA still publishes a free database for American airspace, with a bit of Mexican and Canadian thrown in.
2. Almost every other country in the world refuses to release its air navigation data free to the public, period.
3. The U.S. military used to make up for that by publishing a lot of every other country’s airnav data as well.

No more charity

Sure, I wish they still published the DAFIF (and I suspect their reasons for stopping are silly), but the real villains here are the Canadian government, the British government, the Australian government, and every other government that refuses to release free information to their own citizens about their own airspace. We were lucky that the U.S. DoD was willing to help cover that disgraceful gap for so many years, and that they have given us a good starting point for a free,collaborative airnav database (we still have the last DAFIF edition to start from), but our years of living off American charity have now ended.

A new start?

Speaking of free, collaborative databases, Paul Tomblin has set up a wiki to start discussing life after DAFIF. Why not swing by and take a look. And don’t be surprised if, in the meantime, your favorite flight planning tool suddenly turns Canada into the huge, empty white space that the rest of the world always imagined it was.

Update: Aviatrix is not a quitter — see below.

Update #2: I think the comments are better than my posting, so you might want to skip ahead and read them first (especially the third one).

Update #3: She got back behind the yoke and did great.

After learning the basics of handling an airplane and working in the system, flying is largely about two things: weather, and personal physical limitations. Weather (which I’ve discussed in other postings) is something that you can learn by studying, but personal physical limitations are things that you stumble upon, sometimes fatally, but always unexpectedly.

Finding limitations

Some limitations are obvious — we all know that we cannot live more than a few days without water, that we cannot jump off tall buildings and fly to the ground, and that we will not survive a collision standing in front of a speeding train. Other limitations are trickier, because they are not the same for every person, or change for different times and circumstances. After four hours at 10,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, is your flying impaired? Never? Always? Sometimes? It’s a crap shoot. Put two pilots side by side, and one might be able to solve differential equations in her head, while the other can no longer remember his girlfriend’s last name. Maybe tomorrow it will be the other way around. Ditto for spatial disorientation, fatigue, and the other physical limitations that sometimes sneak up and kill pilots. How long can you hand-fly in IMC and moderate turbulence? Once I did eight hours with no problem; another time, I was physically trembling after four, and had to ground myself and call in help to get a Hope Air patient back home. Good flying is learning to fly safely and well as the pilot you are, not trying to force yourself to become the pilot you wish you were.

Aviatrix and the smoke

All of this is leading up to the latest posting from my favorite blogger, a Canadian commercial pilot who goes by the pseudonym Aviatrix. In her posting Effects of Smoke, she describes the end of a long series of events that led to her decision to resign her job and quit flying altogether being fired from her job and deciding to take time to consider her future in aviation. Flying low, through dense forest-fire smoke (she reported less than a mile visibility) without supplemental oxygen, her sense of judgement became impaired and she had trouble flying the plane, to the point that her first officer had to take over control to make a safe landing.

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news, obviously, is that she lived to blog about her experience. The bad news is that she blames herself and has lost some of her confidence to fly. She never even considers the smoke itself (hypoxia or CO poisoning) as a cause, probably because her first officer seemed unaffected by it, and even now she does not want to admit any physical weakness in the face of the male-dominated world of northern flying. The thing is, personal limitations are kind-of random. For example, consider another male-dominated world, firefighting, where the participants are much more physically fit than the average pilot. Here’s an excerpt from an article about firefighting hazards:

Over 50% of fire-related fatalities are the result of exposure to smoke rather than burns. One of the major contributing factors to mortality and morbidity in fires is hypoxia because of oxygen depletion in the affected atmosphere, leading to loss of physical performance, confusion and inability to escape.

Compare that to Aviatrix’s posting. Sound familiar? Huge, muscular, testosterone-soaked male firefighters exposed to smoke sometimes become as helpless as babies, and their buddies have to pull them out. It’s not a girl thing.

Next steps?

As far as I can tell, without knowing Aviatrix personally, she’s a highly-skilled and experienced pilot who ran hard into a physical limitation for dealing with hypoxia. Does that mean she’s now unsafe to fly? Of course not. If anything, it means that she can become an even better pilot, because she’ll know herself more thoroughly than she did before. She’ll know the early signs of hypoxia from bitter experience, and will (perhaps) grab a small portable oxygen bottle from her flight bag or, if up high and not in smoke, choose a lower altitude before things deteriorate. She’ll cancel a flight that she might have decided to fly before, and will be more confident about her decision. And her passengers will have a much better chance of a safe landing than they would with most of the bold, young male northern pilots who yet to discover how non-negotiable their own personal physical limitations will be.

I think I’m safe in wishing Aviatrix luck from all of her readers. I, for one, would not hesitate to get onto a plane where she was PIC — odds are, she’ll be the safest pilot at any base — and I hope to read more of her flying stories soon.

Google Earth is a 3D geographical visualization program available for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux.

DAFIF is a free (soon-to-be-closed) database of major airports, airways, airspace, etc. around the world.

Now, the Russian Academy of Science has created a mashup of the two (via the Google Earth Blog), so that you can see airways, navaids, etc. while you’re flying around Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed, here’s the link to the DAFIF information.

How long until we can get satellite weather overlayed on Google Earth?

A big engine can cause problems: it burns lots more gas, resulting in higher operating costs and a shorter range (relative to a smaller engine on the same plane); it weighs more, reducing your useful load and complicating weight and balance; and it has more cylinders and other parts to inspect, repair, and overhaul, resulting in higher ownership costs.

A big engine can also bring a lot of joy: it gives you the option of climbing above problems (icing, turbulence, clouds, mountain waves); it can let you fly faster into a brutal headwind (by trading off some range); it gives you more power for takeoff, reducing distances and increasing your useful load; and most importantly, if your airplane is a radio-controlled model, a grossly overpowered engine allows you to do some pretty neat tricks, as shown in this video on YouTube.

Thanks to a posting by Paul Tomblin, I just discovered a new aviation Google-maps mashup. Normally, Google maps lets you switch among a map view, a satellite photo, and a satellite photo with map info superimposed (called a hybrid view). In this mashup, Runway Finder, an anonymous developer (”dave”) has added a view based on tiled and geo-referenced US sectional charts. So now you can go anywhere covered by US sectionals — including many Canadian cities — and zoom in or out, and switch among sectional, road map, and satellite views. Very nice. Unlike other free online sectional viewers, this one gives you a decent size viewing window, on top of all the Google Maps bells and whistles.

The site also shows airports near your current location, with colour coding for weather conditions reported in METARs, as well as TFR outlines. Unfortunately, all of this is available only for the U.S. right now (hint to dave: Paul Tomblin maintains a free database with worldwide airport, navaid, and intersection data). Looking at the sectionals makes me even sadder that the U.S. is the only country with the decency to make geodata and charts available free to the public — it would be nice if VNCs were available for full Canadian chart coverage.

One current shortcoming is that it’s not possible to bookmark a view and come back to it, but I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

Anyone who’s planned a serious cross-country knows not to pay attention to any weather forecast until about 12 hours before the flight, not to take any forecast seriously until 2 hours before the flight, and not to rely on a forecast, ever. Nevertheless, we have to plan flights days or weeks in advance, and passengers want to know if we’ll be able to make a trip.

The regular, public forecasts have limited value for aviation. We need to know where the pressure systems and fronts will (supposedly) be, and what kind of moisture and winds we’ll be facing. The 48-hour U.S. prog charts (which also cover southern Canada) are a common stop, since they’re a lot easier for lay people to interpret than the Environment Canada GEM.

A 48-hour weather forecast is very likely to be completely wrong, but still, many pilots would like to torture themselves by looking even further ahead. For us, there is good (??) news: Unisys publishes U.S. (and southern Canadian) prog charts up to 5 days (yes, that’s 120 hours) ahead, not just for the surface but for higher altitudes like 700 mb (~10,000 feet) and 500 mb (~18,000 feet), with winds. So now you can agonize for five days about your flight — just don’t try to decide until two hours before, because the forecast will probably change.

Ron Dupas has an online collection of postcards, including a large collection with photos of airports. There are some great ones here, including the now-vanished Cartierville airport near Montreal, the TCA hangar in Vancouver in the early 60’s (my first memory of flying is looking at the pictures on the safety card in the seat pocket of a Vickers Viscount), and a shot from inside the control tower at Blatchford field in Edmonton from what looks like the late 1950s (included here).

Here’s a web application that mashes the FAA ATA 100 airport/airspace database with the Google maps public API:

FAA Airports, Airspace fixes Google Maps/Earth interface

It will show the position of any U.S. airport, navaid, or fix, and can plot some basic routes. As I mentioned earlier, I expect to see a lot more of these soon, with a lot more sophistication.