[Tagging] Aerodrome classification

[John Willis]

> On May 20, 2019, at 9:10 PM, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Some mappers have used
> aeroway=airstrip for small airfields without buildings or any other
> developed features

I have mapped airstrips like this. The tag is important, beyond any decision to more granularly map =aerodrome areas. 

Airstrips are usually:

- very short
- an unimproved surface like dirt or grass
- little to no improvement or maintenance beyond what a tractor provides. 
- little-to-no navigation aids
- little-to-no amenities for planes or pilots 
- very limited use by locals or a single purpose company (crop spraying, gliders, etc). 


Publically available flight maps for pilots also make these kinds of distinctions. Large airports of any kind (general aviation, commercial passenger, military) are mapped quite similar, but private dirt airstrips are mapped very differently. They merely are marked.

Here is a proper permanent runway - a nice maintained asphalt runway for smaller planes, center line paint, apron for parking - but with no tower / amenities /navigation aids of any kind: Agua Caliente. It is the smallest runway I would map as an  =areodrome I could think of. 

http://vfrmap.com/?type=vfrc&lat=32.956&lon=-116.295&zoom=10

See how it is just a purple mark? These grass airstrips are not even mapped that way. To the north, The Desert Wings Sky is mapped with an R. It is a short bulldozed flat sandy area in the middle of an old ranch. The surface, condition, length, lack of any navigation aids, and *expected usage* (glider tugs) all set it apart from even the most meager and rarely used maintained runways like Agua Caliente. 

Boreggo Valley (further north) is the local areodrome with a large runway, fuel, staff, and navigation aids. Even without a control tower, this is easily an areodrome.

In my mapping, there are several grass strips, with no improvements of any kind (beyond what a lawnmower could provide), used for tug-plane or winch-launched gliders and skydiving planes to operate out of in the middle of a swamp or along the river in the flood plain. 

There is no way in hell I would map them as an areoway=areodrome - putting it on the map in any way similar to the local general aviation airports or the military and civilian heliports is A-number-one bad mapping - like mapping an anthill as an apartment complex; they are not the same thing whatsoever. 

Similar to the "R" used in flight maps, using =airstrip to designate these low-quality and limited-use airstrips is proper. They should be mapped - but differently. 

And similar to other mapping issues in OSM, perhaps a grass strip in some countries is worthy of being an aerodrome because it is the only runway available, similar to how some bad roads are considered trunk roads in some places due to a lack of any other roads -  but in most countries where there is a vast spectrum of avation facilities, granular tagging is essential, and airstrip plays a role in that. 

Javbw. 
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