Author Archives: David Megginson
New OurAirports feature: pilot, passenger, or both
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 … Continue reading
Tagged OurAirports, web
3 Comments
IFR flight test; OurAirports passes 100 members
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 … Continue reading
Tagged OurAirports, web
8 Comments
OurAirports takes off
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), … Continue reading
Tagged OurAirports, places, web
6 Comments
A Victorian British artilleryman blogs
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 … Continue reading
Three problem airports
Some of you (like Paul Tomblin, who manages navaid.com) have probably already run into this problem, but it turns out that there are at least three airports in the world that cannot safely be assigned to any country, at least … Continue reading
Tagged canada-us, places
4 Comments
What makes an airport 'important'?
If you were building a mapping application that could show only (say) 20 airports on the screen at once at any given zoom level, how would you decide which airports are most important, using only publicly-available data sets? Here are … Continue reading
Tagged numbers, places, statistics
5 Comments
"acting in any capacity other than as a passenger"
The online edition of Sports Illustrated (via CNN) has a story about the NTSB report on the Liddle crash. There’s nothing surprising in the report — the rough outline of the accident chain was obvious early on — but the … Continue reading
Tagged news
2 Comments
The good, the bad, and the (plane) weird
A bunch of us agreed to post on the same topic yesterday, writing about one good part of flying, one bad part, and one weird part (unfortunately, I’m running a day late). Here are some of the other blogs with … Continue reading
DA-42 engine failure
This incident in Germany raises an interesting question about newer aircraft-engine designs. When the pilot(s) of a Diamond Twinstar arrived to find their battery flat, they started both engines using an auxiliary power unit. That’s not an unusual thing to … Continue reading
Tagged news
5 Comments
Land and Hold Short 