The U.S. makes most of its aeronautical data available for free in electronic form; other countries hoard the information and charge money (sometimes, a lot of money) for a peek at it. This distinction used to matter mainly to cartographers working with giant mainframe computers, but now that almost everyone flies with a GPS (handheld or panel-mount) our airplanes have become flying databases and they’re getting hungry for information, preferably information that’s free (as in speech).

There are two projects currently underway that will not help to feed our GPS’s directly, but will, at least, give pilots a chance to share more information with each other. First, the Wikipedia has a large number of airport articles underway, and anyone can contribute to any of the articles (or start a new one). The best place to start is the Airports category, which has a top-level entry for each country, and then drill down. Coverage is uneven, representing the interests of the people who happen to have contributed so far — for example, there are currently only 7 airports listed for New Jersey, but 22 airports listed for Nunavut — and many of the airport articles are short stubs, but those are problems that more contributors can easily fix. Please go over and add information (and pictures) for airports that you know well, or start new articles. Since most of Wikipedia’s readers are not pilots, this is a great chance to educate the public about general aviation.

Another new collaborative resource is the COPA Places to Fly directory. Unlike the freeform Wikipedia, the COPA directory is set up to be highly structured, closely mimicking the layout of the Canada Flight Supplement, and its audience is clearly pilots. There’s not much there yet, but it holds the promise of some day providing a free electronic replacement for the CFS, assuming that there’s some way to export it to portable devices, and that people find some way of ensuring data quality in a collaborative environment (i.e. some kind of peer review and reputation management).