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.