[Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Old Aerodromes

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Wolfgang Zenker <wolfgang at lyxys.ka.sub.org
> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> * Martijn van Exel <m at rtijn.org> [160412 16:29]:
> > Thanks for the feedback. I understand that the existence of an small
> airfield can be hard to verify from imagery - [..]
>
> one more thing to check: If the node was imported from GNIS, check the GNIS
> website searching for the feature id. In some cases that I have seen the
> GNIS entry had moved to "historical" status since the feature had been
> imported. If a feature in GNIS has "(historical)" at the end of the name
> field it means the feature does no longer exist, so we can delete it in
> OSM.
>

Inside Tulsa City and vicinity, I've ground-surveyed the airports around
here.  Harvey Young was probably the most interesting case, since everyone
I asked said it had closed years before.  Nope!  Still operational.
Another unlikely one that I found was Silverwood Ultralight Airport, which
I was very certain that if the swamp hadn't got it, the elevated portion of
the Liberty Parkway did.  It's actually a mile south of where GNIS thought
it was, but still has the Liberty Parkway as a flightpath obstruction!
It's pretty much a rancher's hairy-short dirt strip, not uncomplicated by
the fact there's numerous oak trees and an elevated motorway immediately
adjacent, but still is operational with the owner and his friends.

On the extreme opposite end of the spectrum was a third international
airport in Oklahoma.  Which...not entirely implausible, Tulsa's not
gigantic nor has scheduled overseas commercial passenger flights outside
the US borders that I'm aware of, but does have customs mostly for shipping
and flight crews, as Tulsa's the maintenance base for all of American
Airlines major repairs, as well as Lufthansa's US operations, and has
shipping flights on both UPS and FedEx, as well as direct nonstop shipping
to and from Kazakstan because NASA and eastern Oklahoma's deeply entrenched
space industry (at it's peak building over 90% of what went into the space
shuttles and it's rocket boosters, everything from mom-and-pops that went
out of business with the end of the shuttle program right up through NORDAM
and Rocketdyne).  The other's Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.
The third?  Doesn't, and never has, existed except on some dusty TIGER
records at the location of an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of a
field.  Everything within a several mile radius is regularly plowed
agricultural field with no evidence that even an ultralight could use it,
and unpaved, graded county line section roads.  Deleted...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20160412/b2285252/attachment.html>