Dave: Yes, I did think of the “I might get sued” problem, but it’s there already — someone could claim that a loved one typed some (incorrect, user-contributed) coordinates into a GPS and then flew into a mountain. Agreed about disclaimers.

Paul: There are a lot of good flight planning sites out there already. I’m not ruling it out completely, but I think OurAirports could play a better role as an honest open-data broker for all of them.

Blake: right now, the member airport map accounts for only 0.17% of page views. The people who use the feature love it, but it’s not a significant part of the site’s traffic. These are the most-common destinations:

1. Airport airline arrivals and departures: 45%
2. Airport map (and most-recent comments): 13%
3. Airport pilot info (weather, NOTAMs, frequencies, etc.): 9%
4. List of airports in a state or province: 7%
5. Local search results: 4%
6. Other airports close to an airport: 4%
7. Home page: 3%

After that, it breaks into a very long tail. The fact that arrivals and departures account for so much makes me nervous, because it’s not original value added by OurAirports; it’s just a couple of iFrames embedded (as allowed) from FlightStats, and a third-party service can disappear at any time (as many Twitter client apps discovered).

Because of that vulnerability, I’d like to refocus OurAirports on the areas where it really can add original value — my posting was wondering out loud if interpretive weather info could be one of those areas (with 68,000 pageviews a month already for the ugly, messy pilot-info page, there’s clearly some demand)

I agree with Pat. I don’t really think users of OA would even benefit from such a service (weather, etc..)

Personally, I use OA to keep track of which airports I’ve been to and to leave comments about airports. That’s it. Sure, I may not be the “typical” OA user, but I would argue that is what the majority of users of the site do.

As for the weather/flight planning I think that sounds like self imposed feature creep. There are already so many great tools out there on the internet/devices. First make OA the best platform for renting and airplane out there. Add the candy and shiny things later.

Keep up the great work btw! I am looking forward to getting checked out sometime soon.

If you ask the users, there will need to be features for the most prolific commenters:
– the “when the hell” guy
– the pet scam victims in Douala
– the Philippines immigration people.