Other ways to protest that a person can do.

Libyan people using violence to overcome violence, ONLY NEW VIOLENCE AGAINST THE VIOLENCE.

Please all the people of Vietnam Hero follow Libyan people:

Gasoline burn all government buildings, the gas plants, the tank cars carrying fuel, the homes of Communist Party members Hunting Dogs.

Each comment then goes on to provide detailed instructions with different ways of making and using Molotov cocktails. My approach to comment moderation on OurAirports is fairly permissive — I’m happy to leave in comments with strong language, political views, or even scammers trying to defend themselves (it’s fun to see other commenters take them down). I will not, however, allow comments encouraging violence, and even more importantly, I won’t allow comments that include weapon-making instructions.

In a wonderful bit of unintended irony, each comment ends like this:

The U.S. government declared, would send U.S. troops to guard the people’s protests, the people in countries with rebel demands to overthrow dictatorships.

The United States — saviour of the Vietnamese people?

world : continent *
continent : country *
country : region *
region : airport *

It’s the kind of neat data structure that people like me love, but that never quite works. First of all, not every country is divided into regions (provinces/states/etc.) and I don’t always know what region an airport is in, but I deal with that by adding an “Unassigned” pseudo-region to every country.

More importantly, not every country belongs to a single continent. The most obvious exceptions are Russia and Turkey, both of which span Europe and Asia, but there may be others that I haven’t thought of.

So here are my questions:

1. Are there any countries besides Russia and Turkey that span more than one continent?
2. Are there any subdivisions of the above countries that span more than one continent? For example, does Turkey have a province, or does Russia have an oblast that lies in both Asia and Europe?

I’m trying to figure out if I can link regions to continents, or if I have do have a link from every single airport.

Thanks in advance for any help.

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

You can see where members live, and if there are any at airports near you (or near where you plan to travel to). Zoom in to see more members (there are about 750 members in total).

These are based on the home airports specified in members’ profiles. It’s nice to see lots outside North America.

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.

http://www.ourairports.com/airports/CYVR/

becomes

http://www.ourairports.com/airports/CYVR/notams.rss

You can subscribe to this RSS 2.0 feed using any standard blog reader,such as Google Reader, filter and mash it up using Yahoo Pipes, etc.

Previously, you could search for a town or city in OurAirports only if that city had an airport; for example, you could find Smiths Falls, Ontario, but not Perth, Ontario. With geocoding, OurAirports shows the closest airports to any address, and that’s now the default search mode. You can also filter the search results to show only airports with scheduled airline service, only seaplane bases, etc.

For example, for a commercial air traveler, here are the closest airline airports to the Grand Canyon; for a film-star bush pilot, here are the closest seaplane bases to Hollywood, California.

There’s a lot more information, and many more examples, on the new search help page

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.

Map of customs airports near Vancouver and Seattle

Zoom out and drag to see other parts of Canada and the U.S., or start with the full customs map.

Note that some airports have only seasonal service and/or limited operating hours, and that U.S. “landing rights” airports sometimes charge a fee for customs services. I have not included CANPASS-only airports on the map, because they are available only to pilots who have preregistered in the CANPASS program. I have also excluded unofficial (but frequently-used) customs airports like Maxson Field and Sanderson Field that are located near border crossings.

As I mentioned in a previous post, OurAirports now lets you invent your own tags for airports and view maps of the airports you’ve tagged. This morning, I made a map of 60 of the airports that were part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP):

Map: http://www.ourairports.com/members/david/tags/bcatp/

You can drag the map around and zoom in to see specific areas (Eastern Ontario was especially dense). The map (which is still missing a few airports) shows how much the BCATP shaped aviation in Canada — while it used existing airfields when possible, many of the fields were built specifically for the plan, and most of those are still operational. Some still have original hangar buildings, and many maintain the original triangle of three runways that’s so typical of Canadian airports (often with one extended to handle light jets).

While Canada was chosen because of its safe distance from combat and easy access to fuel, wartime flight training was still a brutal business in the BCATP — you could expect at least one fatality in every class training in planes like the Tiger Moth pictured above. Little RCAF Pennfield Ridge, for example, lost 61 student pilots and instructors during its three or four years of operation as a navigational and operational school.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

1. Canadian customs airports of entry (my tag “airport-of-entry”) Update: expanded to include U.S. airports of entry as well
2. Airports where I’ve done an instrument approach in actual IMC (my tag “instrument-approach”)

You have to be logged in to use this feature, then you’ll see a tags option in the right sidebar on each airport page. You can tag airports you’ve visited in different years or flying different planes; airports with good restaurants or flight schools; or anything else you want. Each tag is a single word, or a series of words connected by ‘-‘, ‘.’, or ‘_’, e.g. ‘fuel-stop’, ‘club-member’, ‘fees’, etc.

On the TODO list: rename a tag, to export tags to KML (for Google Earth), show most popular tags on each airport page.

• active land airports,
• airports with scheduled airline service,
• seaplane bases, or
• everything, including heliports, closed airports, etc.

(I figured there’s no point showing only heliports, since helicopters can land at regular airports as well).

Here’s a list of airports in Western Australia with scheduled airline service, and here’s a list of the closest seaplane bases to Edmonton, Alberta.

When pilots think of an airport, they think of anywhere they can safely and legally land their planes. It might or might not have a a fence, pavement, fuel pumps, or any structures at all (even an outhouse), much less a terminal building with departure gates and a security checkpoint.

When non-pilots think of an airport, they usually think of somewhere they can buy a ticket and get on a plane. Even in a small city, it will usually have an overpriced parking lot, paved runways, an ugly terminal building, fuel trucks, etc. etc.

Have it your way …

I want to make OurAirports useful for both groups of people, so I’ve been scavenging information on the web to flag which of the 33,000+ airports currently in the database have any kind of scheduled airline service (even in a light piston twin). The roughly 3,000 airports that I’ve found with airline service are now flagged in the database, and have a small note at the top of their right sidebars. Soon, I’ll make changes so that people who want to see only airports with airline service can filter out everything else.

This stuff changes all the time, and my sources might not be entirely reliable, so please send me corrections etc.

CSV format change

NB: for anyone using the CSV data export at http://www.ourairports.com/data/airports.csv, the format will be changing as of tomorrow, adding an extra column “scheduled_service” with the value “yes” or “no”. As far as I know, this is the only free, machine-readable dataset with this information available online.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I’ll be giving a short demo of OurAirports at DemoCamp Ottawa 9 next Monday (26 May 2008). Feel free to drop by if you’re in town. It’s at The Velvet Room in the ByWard Market, starting at 7:00 pm.

For example, here’s why there are so many accidents around Hope, BC when the weather gets low.

I’ve finally gotten around to adding free data downloads to OurAirports. You can now download nightly CSV-formatted data dumps of all the airports, countries, and regions in OurAirports at

http://www.ourairports.com/data/

These will open with most spreadsheet and database programs (make sure you import them as UTF-8).

All data is released into the Public Domain and comes with no warranty. If you have any corrections or additions, please make them in the spreadsheet and then send them back to me.

Here’s a screenshot of a map of the Vancouver area — you should be able to make out 3 floatplane bases, 7 heliports, and 6 airports (you can jump to the live map to explore further):

Thanks again to George Plews for collecting the Canadian data. Does anyone have a good reference for heliports and floatplane bases outside of Canada and the U.S. (or even for more fixed-wing airports)?

Take a look at Ottawa Rockcliffe or Teterboro to see some examples, then mark some of the spots at your local airport so that I’ll know where to park, fuel up, and eat next time I fly in.

1. (easy) Click on the “Share this map” link at the top right of the map, then copy and paste the single line of HTML markup into your blog or web page.
2. (slightly more advanced) Use the KML link (also provided) to integrate with Google Earth, Google Maps, or other KML-enabled applications.

Here’s my current pilot map (it might not show up in RSS readers). OurAirports will keep it up to date even after I make my posting:

If you want to make your embedded map a different size, just edit the values of the width and height attributes near the start of the line of HTML.