New OurAirports feature: pilot, passenger, or both

Posted on July 27, 2007 by David Megginson

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 and you’ve checked the “pilot” box on the signin or member options page you’ll see a drop-down menu at the top of each airport page where you can specify how you’ve visited an airport:

  • As a pilot
  • As a passenger
  • Both

On your personal map page, you can now select (just above the map) to see all the airports you’ve visited, only the airports you’ve visited as a pilot/flight crew, or only the airports you’ve visited as a passenger (or not specified). All of these can be bookmarked. Here are all my airports, the airports I’ve visited as a pilot, and the airports I’ve visited as a passenger.

This isn’t the FAA or Transport Canada, so there are no regulations to fuss over — you get to decide for yourself what constitutes being a pilot (PIC? SIC? taking the yoke for 10 minutes in cruise?) or passenger, or even visiting an airport (maybe just shooting an approach or doing a touch-and-go?).

Here’s the controversial part…

Changes are never painless once a site has a lot of members. OurAirports members have already clicked the “I’ve been here” checkbox for different airports many thousands of times, and I know that some of you (especially those who’ve entered several hundred airports) would not appreciate having to go back to all of them and enter “pilot” manually, so here’s what I did: if (and only if) you checked that you are a pilot, I automatically set the role of all the airports you’ve visited as “pilot” — that way, you have to go back and change only the ones that you visited as a passenger (airline, GA, or even city bus if you like) or as both a passenger and pilot on separate occasions.

Unfortunately, until you make that change, it might look like spinning some grandiose claims, e.g. you’ve flow as pilot not only to Tallgrass Field and Hicksville Regional, but also to Atlanta, Heathrow, JFK, SFO, LAX, and Charles de Gaulle — pretty good for a student pilot in a Cessna 152! If anyone is worried about that, please let me know, and I can reset all of your airports to “unspecified” using a simple database query.

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IFR flight test; OurAirports passes 100 members

Posted on July 23, 2007 by David Megginson

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 of them, and there are many maps I haven’t looked at yet. The personal airports-visited maps I have seen are fascinating — most pilots have clusters around their home airports, with a few further away from long cross countries, but some follow other patterns, like long, east-west lines. A few have made maps of their airline travel, and I plan on giving a way soon to distinguish airports visited as a passenger from airports visited as a pilot.

By the way, the 100th member was MarkAnd, who’s done most of his flying in Ohio and western Pennsylvania. At the time of writing, we have 103 members in total. Thanks to MarkAnd and to everyone else who’s contributed to the site.

(I’ve moved the site to a fast, dedicated server, and the performance problems seem to be over.)

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OurAirports takes off

Posted on July 18, 2007 by David Megginson

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), a new-fangled kind of service which creates some pretty strange issues around database table writes and locking compared to running on a single host, and you don’t see the problems until a lot of people are trying to do things at the same time. If the site was too slow when you first visited, you might want to take a second look and see if it’s better.

XingR’s notes from a lifetime of flying

Enough tech talk. You’re here to read about flying, and whether you’re a new student or a 20,000-hour airline pilot, I think you’ll enjoy reading the beautiful comments — mini-essays, really — that OurAirports member XingR has been contributing about his lifetime spent in and around airports on several continents, both in civilian life and through a long military career (he’s currently living near Clark Intl, the former huge U.S. military base in the Phillipines). You can read all of XingR’s comments (in reverse order) on his comments page, and follow the links to see the airports. Thanks, XingR.

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Make a web map of the airports you've visited

Posted on July 17, 2007 by David Megginson

My airport map

I’ve written a web site called OurAirports that lets you make a map of the airports you’ve visited (either as a pilot or as a passenger, your choice). Here’s my personal map — note that you can share your maps with anyone, not just other members:

http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/

To make your own map, set up a free account (takes about 30 seconds), then just click in the “I’ve been here!” box on each airport’s page. You can also browse the airports of the world on The Big Map or drill down geographically. My favourite, though, is warping to a random airport.

Please help a bit…

This is just a web site, not a startup — sadly, there aren’t enough of us to build a real business out of this. But there’s no point spending any more time on it if the site’s not fun, so if you don’t do anything else please visit the site and let me know what I could do to make it more fun for you as a pilot, airline passenger, GA passenger, etc.

… and a bit more …

If you feel like helping even more, I’d be grateful if you could show the site to other people who like flying and find out what they think of it. The site lets you leave comments on airports, like AirNav.com does, except that it includes airports outside the U.S. and doesn’t force you to attach comments to a specific FBO. The more comments people leave, the more useful the site is.

… and even more?

Finally, if you’re really hardcore helpful (or you’re stuck in a long layover with nothing else to do), here are some of the things I’m thinking about for the next step, and I’d love to hear people’s preferences:

  • Let people categorize airport comments (FBO, wifi, fuel, food, ground transpo, etc.) so that it’s easier to find information.

  • Set up editing and moderation privileges, so that members can add and correct airport (and maybe navaid?) data to keep it current.

  • Add forums for organizing fly-ins, buying or selling used stuff (tools, GPS, plane, whatever), or even ride boards linked to individual airports, so that you can see what’s going on in your area.

  • Add navaids, fixes, and basic flight-planning support (draw lines on the map) — this would appeal only to pilots, of course.

  • Add bulk entry of airports, so that you can just type all the IDs of the airports you’ve visited into a textarea instead of going to each airport page and clicking.

  • Export airport data in GPX format, so that you can load it into your GPS.

  • Let members upload GPS tracks to the site, so that they can be displayed on the map and shared with other people.

  • Add the usual airport data that other sites have (runway lengths, frequencies, etc.)

  • Try to dig up information on airline schedules and link it to the site.

  • Give up on the whole idea and do something useful with my free time.

Let me know what you think, and please help me let other pilots know about the site. If you want to send me private email instead of commenting here, my GMail id is david.megginson, and the domain for GMail addresses is gmail.com.

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A Victorian British artilleryman blogs

Posted on June 29, 2007 by David Megginson

William Henry Ranson

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 during the 1860s, he ended up settling in Canada permanently in the 1870s. While many British officers kept diaries and wrote memoirs, very few men of the ranks did — although a good number could read and write, few had the inclination and the available time (and light) to do so — but my great-great-grandfather was an exception. While we don’t have the original diary, we do have a summary that he wrote later in life as a memoir, based on the lost diary, giving a working man’s view of both the British military and of later civilian life (often more brutal) in Victorian Canada.

My brother Tom has had the memoir for some years and has been trying to decide the best way to edit and publish it. In the end, he has decided to publish sections serially as a blog. I encourage anyone interested in British or Canadian history to read this. The blog format reminds me very strongly of the serial magazine publication common during the Victorian period.

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Three problem airports

Posted on June 1, 2007 by David Megginson

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 not without causing a diplomatic incident. This is a problem for database architects as well as ambassadors, because the normal way to organize airports in a database is to sort them by country (and to assume that every airport has one).

Problem airport #1: Woody Island

Woody Island is one of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea. The islands and reefs are surrounded by major fisheries and possible oil and gas reserves, and are claimed by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Most recently, China seized control of the islands from South Vietnam near the end of the Vietnam War, but the other countries have not given up their claim, and China’s possession has not received international recognition.

China operates an airport (VH84) on Woody Island as part of its emergency rescue centre on the island.

Problem airport #2: Swallow Reef

Swallow Reef is part of the Spratley Islands, also in the South China Sea. Like the Paracel Islands, the Spratly Islands are surrounded by major fisheries and potential oil and gas reserves. In addition to China, Taiwan, and Vietnam, each of which claims the entire chain, Malaysia and the Philippines claim some of the islands, and Brunei has established a fishing zone which includes one of the reefs. None of these claims has received international recognition, and all of the countries (except Brunei) maintain small military forces on various islands.

Malaysia happens to occupy Swallow Reef, and it maintains both a naval base and a tourist resort there, with an airport (RP10) to serve them.

Problem airport #3: Jerusalem

Saving the most controversial for last, Jerusalem International Airport, aka Atarot Airport — which has been non-operational and controlled by the Israeli Defence Force since 2001 — is in the West Bank occupied territory near Ramallah. It actually has two ICAO codes: OJJR (OJ is the prefix for Jordan, which formerly owned the West Bank), and LLJR (LL is the prefix for Israel, which currently controls the West Bank).

Our side of the pond(s)

We’ve done a better job dealing with our problem airports in North America. Piney Pinecreek Border Airport (48Y) in Piney, Manitoba, Avey State Field (69S) in Laurier, Washington, and International Peace Garden Airport (S28) in Dunseith, North Dakota all have runways that actually cross or at least touch the Canada/U.S. border (Dunseith’s runway actually ends at a highway border crossing, so there are both U.S. and Canadian customs booths onsite). They have U.S. identifiers, but we list them in the Canada Flight Supplement as well. No need to refight the War of 1812.

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What makes an airport 'important'?

Posted on May 25, 2007 by David Megginson

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 some possibilities:

  • Points for being in the list of the top 100 passenger airports.
  • Points for having an ICAO code.
  • Points for having an IATA code (rarer, so more points than an ICAO code).
  • Points for each localizer and glideslope (since they’re unambiguously associated with the airport).
  • Points for having a TAF.
  • Points for having a METAR.
  • Points for each long, paved runway.

These are all easy to measure, but I’m not sure that they capture enough of what makes an airport important for mapping purposes. Really big airports often cluster around urban areas — think of JFK, EWR, and LGA around New York, or LHR, LGW, and LCY around London. These are all busy airports, but they’re very short drives from each other (traffic permitting), so perhaps they don’t have the same kind of importance on a map as the main airport in a smaller country, the only airport serving an isolated community or an island, etc.

I’ve done some experimenting trying to measure isolation: for example, I’ve tried limiting the map to one airport in each 30×30 deg square (world level) or 10×10 deg square (continent level), but the map still ends up with huge clusters of airports in the U.S. and Western Europe and none in most of the rest of the world, and even a 10×10 square means that Toronto’s and Montreal’s main airports won’t show up (same square as JFK and EWR). What would Google do?

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"acting in any capacity other than as a passenger"

Posted on May 1, 2007 by David Megginson

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 story does mention an interesting side issue: Liddle’s Major League Baseball benefit package included USD 1M life insurance, but with an exclusion for an aircraft accident where the insured is “acting in any capacity other than as a passenger.”

The SI story talks about figuring out who was at the controls during the crash, but that’s not the point. Even if someone were to discover a photo showing Liddle’s instructor, Tyler Stranger, at the controls just before the crash, Liddle could still have been acting as pilot in command during the flight; if so, he would have continued in that capacity even when Stranger was at the controls. Likewise, if he were paying Stranger as his instructor during the flight, then he was acting in the capacity of a student, not a passenger, no matter who was at the controls or who was PIC.

I’m no fan of aviation exclusions in life insurance (my own insurer agreed not to put one in), and I don’t want to cheer the insurer on in the upcoming lawsuit, but there’s an important point to be made here about flying. As other aviation bloggers have pointed out, its the responsibility for a flight, not the physical manipulation of the controls, that defines a pilot in command. Two centuries ago Nelson’s Royal Navy, captains rarely, if ever, touched the wheels of their ships — that was the helmsmen’s job — but nobody doubted that they were captains, all the same.

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The good, the bad, and the (plane) weird

Posted on April 29, 2007 by David Megginson

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 a post:

The good

June 17-18, 2003. I had just finished giving a long evening seminar in the financial district in lower Manhattan, I was exhausted, and it was very late. My original plan had been to fly home to Ottawa the next day, but bad weather was going to be arriving early in the morning and staying for the next few days, and as a VFR-only, 150-hour private pilot (my license only 9 months old), I had to fly out that night or stay the rest of the week. I got a lift with someone out to Caldwell Airport in New Jersey, my eyes heavy and drooping on the drive. I found an open gate, preflighted, and started my plane just as the control tower was closing for the night at 11:30 pm.

This sounds more like the beginning of an accident report than a good experience, and it’s even worse when you consider that JFK Jr. set out on his own fateful night flight from this same airport. I had a tiny handheld non-aviation Garmin GPS with me, but it wasn’t an aviation GPS, so my primary navigation that night was VOR/DME, and the whole trip was hand-flown (I still don’t have an autopilot). As soon as I started my engine, I was wide awake, and since I was hand-flying, I stayed that way for the whole flight — after a bit of an awkward time crawling under NY airspace, I climbed up high in a clear sky, and for the next two and a half hours I watched the lights of rural New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario slowly roll away under my wings. As I approached Ottawa Airport at 2:00 am, there was no one else around, and tower told me just to approach the airport from any direction I wanted and pick any runway. A woman from customs was waiting to meet me — I had to pay a call-out charge of about $40, but it was well worth it. I’ve had a lot of wonderful flying experiences, but nothing compares to that early, dream-like night flight, that I never should have tried.

The bad

I’ve had a few bad experiences actually flying, but for me, the hardest stuff has been what happens on the ground. Even a small, private plane requires a lot of attention, to the keep the plane safe, the paperwork legal, and the costs under control, and then there’s the problem of my own recency. If you don’t fly for a living, those stresses are in addition to your job (instead of being part of it), and they made for some bad nights and big bills early on. After four and a half years of ownership, I now enjoy my plane and don’t have to spend nearly as much time or money on it, but I could go back in time, I don’t know if I’d go through all that again to get to this point.

The (plane) weird

I’ve heard some pretty strange things over the radio, and always enjoy the sight of my Warrior parked on a ramp beside a row of bizjets or even military fighters, but for the weird part, I’ve decided to pick something that will seem bizarre to pilots outside Quebec and the Ottawa region: bilingual radio calls.

In Ottawa and Quebec, air traffic control and FSS is required to operate in French as well as English, and at uncontrolled airports, pilots will often make position reports, etc., in French. I’ll announce in English that I’m joining the downwind, a pilot will announce in French that he’s taking the runway, someone else will do a radio check in English, the Unicom operator may attempt to give me an advisory in English and then give up (at small Quebec airports, many Unicom operators speak very little English). Somehow or other, we avoid each-other, but it must be a terrifying experience for a unilingual English or French pilot, hearing radio calls and not knowing what they mean (especially if the caller’s voice is urgent).

My flight instructor was francophone but didn’t think much of the bilingual system in the air, and I agree — the air is a place that safety should trump politics. Make all pilots learn to speak English, French, Mandarin, or whatever, but please make sure we’re all speaking the same language up there, whatever it is.

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DA-42 engine failure

Posted on April 26, 2007 by David Megginson

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 do for a regular piston aircraft, since the alternator or generator will recharge the battery after a few minutes of flight (although it’s better for the battery’s life to trickle charge it); unfortunately, that turns out not to have been a good idea for the Twinstar, which suffered a double-engine failure on takeoff during gear retraction, and had to be belly landed in a field.

The battery was still flat when the pilots started to retract the gear. The gear retraction required enough power that it caused a brief electrical interruption to the Centurion 1.7 diesel engines, and that interruption caused both engines to reset. Now Diamond and Centurion are debating the issue: Centurion points out that operating procedures require at least one engine to be started on battery rather than APU, while Diamond points out that in tests, the engine fails after only a 1.7 ms power interruption, while it should be able to tolerate at least 50 ms.

Magnetos don’t need a battery

I’m sure that the companies will work it out, but in the meantime I’m happy that the 1940s-style technology powering my Warrior is a bit more robust. Once the propeller’s spinning, I could disconnect the battery and throw it out the window, and the engine would still keep running until the tanks are empty — the electricity for the spark plugs comes from a redundant pair of magnetos powered by the engine itself, and do not require a battery or alternator to keep working.

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