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.