CYRO-CYAM VFR, 4.4 hours flight time (4.2 air time) PIC #flightlog

CYTZ-CYRO IFR 1.8 PIC in a PA-28-161 #flightlog

No one is using this hashtag for anything else, and it would make it easy for pilots to find other pilots on Twitter who’ve flown the same routes or used the same airports. So far, of course, I’m the only pilot to find.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.)

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.

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.

[Update: see below.]

According to Snopes, this photo is legit — it’s a Cherokee 180 N6487J that crashed into a tree during a forced approach near Meadowlake Airport in Colorado last month after the engine lost power (the pilot, who was the sole occupant, had no serious injuries).

The picture is circulating around the Internet because of the funny juxtaposition of a flight school sign and a small plane crashed into a tree behind it. However, American Aviation uses Cessnas as its primary trainers (and a Piper Arrow for complex training), and the PA-28-180 in the picture is registered to a real-estate company, so unless it was on a lease-back, it really has nothing to do with the flying school or flying lessons. Still, it is hard not to come up with funny captions …

Well, the DAFIF — the free database of worldwide aeronautical information that used to be available free from the U.S. Department of Defense — has been gone for a few weeks, and it’s having repercussions that I hadn’t anticipated. It turns out that the most popular flight planning web site, Aeroplanner, was using the DAFIF for their non-U.S. data, so Canada has suddenly gone blank: aside from a few major airports and navaids that happen to be in the FAA database, and the segments of a few airways crossing the border, the airways, intersections, navaids, airports, terminal airspace, control zones, restricted airspace, and everything else that used to crowed their online maps is gone, leaving the site useless for anyone (Canadian or American) planning a flight that doesn’t stay entirely within U.S. airspace. The company graciously offered me a pro-rated refund for my subscription, though I decided not to take them up on it.

Lots of other people use the DAFIF for cheap or free flight planning, for controlling aircraft in flight simulators, and much more. In many cases, they can keep using the last public edition, which will slowly get more and more out of date, but that obviously wouldn’t be a responsible choice for a real-world online flight planning service like Aeroplanner.

Who’s the real villain?

So who should we be mad at? The U.S. DoD is an obvious target, since they’re the ones who pulled the data from public use, but let’s step back and think for a second:

1. In the U.S., the FAA still publishes a free database for American airspace, with a bit of Mexican and Canadian thrown in.
2. Almost every other country in the world refuses to release its air navigation data free to the public, period.
3. The U.S. military used to make up for that by publishing a lot of every other country’s airnav data as well.

No more charity

Sure, I wish they still published the DAFIF (and I suspect their reasons for stopping are silly), but the real villains here are the Canadian government, the British government, the Australian government, and every other government that refuses to release free information to their own citizens about their own airspace. We were lucky that the U.S. DoD was willing to help cover that disgraceful gap for so many years, and that they have given us a good starting point for a free,collaborative airnav database (we still have the last DAFIF edition to start from), but our years of living off American charity have now ended.

A new start?

Speaking of free, collaborative databases, Paul Tomblin has set up a wiki to start discussing life after DAFIF. Why not swing by and take a look. And don’t be surprised if, in the meantime, your favorite flight planning tool suddenly turns Canada into the huge, empty white space that the rest of the world always imagined it was.

Update #2: I think the comments are better than my posting, so you might want to skip ahead and read them first (especially the third one).

Update #3: She got back behind the yoke and did great.

After learning the basics of handling an airplane and working in the system, flying is largely about two things: weather, and personal physical limitations. Weather (which I’ve discussed in other postings) is something that you can learn by studying, but personal physical limitations are things that you stumble upon, sometimes fatally, but always unexpectedly.

Finding limitations

Some limitations are obvious — we all know that we cannot live more than a few days without water, that we cannot jump off tall buildings and fly to the ground, and that we will not survive a collision standing in front of a speeding train. Other limitations are trickier, because they are not the same for every person, or change for different times and circumstances. After four hours at 10,000 feet without supplemental oxygen, is your flying impaired? Never? Always? Sometimes? It’s a crap shoot. Put two pilots side by side, and one might be able to solve differential equations in her head, while the other can no longer remember his girlfriend’s last name. Maybe tomorrow it will be the other way around. Ditto for spatial disorientation, fatigue, and the other physical limitations that sometimes sneak up and kill pilots. How long can you hand-fly in IMC and moderate turbulence? Once I did eight hours with no problem; another time, I was physically trembling after four, and had to ground myself and call in help to get a Hope Air patient back home. Good flying is learning to fly safely and well as the pilot you are, not trying to force yourself to become the pilot you wish you were.

Aviatrix and the smoke

All of this is leading up to the latest posting from my favorite blogger, a Canadian commercial pilot who goes by the pseudonym Aviatrix. In her posting Effects of Smoke, she describes the end of a long series of events that led to her decision to resign her job and quit flying altogether being fired from her job and deciding to take time to consider her future in aviation. Flying low, through dense forest-fire smoke (she reported less than a mile visibility) without supplemental oxygen, her sense of judgement became impaired and she had trouble flying the plane, to the point that her first officer had to take over control to make a safe landing.

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news, obviously, is that she lived to blog about her experience. The bad news is that she blames herself and has lost some of her confidence to fly. She never even considers the smoke itself (hypoxia or CO poisoning) as a cause, probably because her first officer seemed unaffected by it, and even now she does not want to admit any physical weakness in the face of the male-dominated world of northern flying. The thing is, personal limitations are kind-of random. For example, consider another male-dominated world, firefighting, where the participants are much more physically fit than the average pilot. Here’s an excerpt from an article about firefighting hazards:

Over 50% of fire-related fatalities are the result of exposure to smoke rather than burns. One of the major contributing factors to mortality and morbidity in fires is hypoxia because of oxygen depletion in the affected atmosphere, leading to loss of physical performance, confusion and inability to escape.

Compare that to Aviatrix’s posting. Sound familiar? Huge, muscular, testosterone-soaked male firefighters exposed to smoke sometimes become as helpless as babies, and their buddies have to pull them out. It’s not a girl thing.

Next steps?

As far as I can tell, without knowing Aviatrix personally, she’s a highly-skilled and experienced pilot who ran hard into a physical limitation for dealing with hypoxia. Does that mean she’s now unsafe to fly? Of course not. If anything, it means that she can become an even better pilot, because she’ll know herself more thoroughly than she did before. She’ll know the early signs of hypoxia from bitter experience, and will (perhaps) grab a small portable oxygen bottle from her flight bag or, if up high and not in smoke, choose a lower altitude before things deteriorate. She’ll cancel a flight that she might have decided to fly before, and will be more confident about her decision. And her passengers will have a much better chance of a safe landing than they would with most of the bold, young male northern pilots who yet to discover how non-negotiable their own personal physical limitations will be.

I think I’m safe in wishing Aviatrix luck from all of her readers. I, for one, would not hesitate to get onto a plane where she was PIC — odds are, she’ll be the safest pilot at any base — and I hope to read more of her flying stories soon.

DAFIF is a free (soon-to-be-closed) database of major airports, airways, airspace, etc. around the world.

Now, the Russian Academy of Science has created a mashup of the two (via the Google Earth Blog), so that you can see airways, navaids, etc. while you’re flying around Google Earth. If you have Google Earth installed, here’s the link to the DAFIF information.

How long until we can get satellite weather overlayed on Google Earth?

A big engine can also bring a lot of joy: it gives you the option of climbing above problems (icing, turbulence, clouds, mountain waves); it can let you fly faster into a brutal headwind (by trading off some range); it gives you more power for takeoff, reducing distances and increasing your useful load; and most importantly, if your airplane is a radio-controlled model, a grossly overpowered engine allows you to do some pretty neat tricks, as shown in this video on YouTube.