[Talk-us] Old Aerodromes

[Andrew Wiseman]

I'm also glad to see this, and wish I had thought to mention it when I
first saw it! I was mapping in Knoxville, TN and there were a dozen
airports that clearly didn't exist. Most had in the past but weren't now,
so I tagged them with the appropriate life cycle prefix. I also noticed a
ton in SW Virginia, like somebody said many in forests and in the middle of
neighborhoods that clearly didn't exist anymore. I didn't realize it was
such a widespread thing!

Maproulette sounds like a good solution, maybe also add something about
looking it up online to make sure it's not just a wide space that planes
sometimes land in.

Or maybe there should be some tag difference between a proper airport with
scheduled flights, a civil aviation airport, and just a field where a
farmer might land?

Andrew

On Tuesday, April 12, 2016, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 2:29 PM, Elliott Plack <elliott.plack at gmail.com
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','elliott.plack at gmail.com');>> wrote:
>
>> I am glad this conversation has restarted. A few of you, (Me, Paul,
>> others..) will recall a similar conversation on the openstreetmap-carto
>> repo a few years ago where I noted that there are simply too many of these
>> micro airports shown on the map. We discussed at great length how the
>> relative importance of aerodromes could potentially be used for rendering.
>>
>
> I'm not sure what my original thoughts were but where I'm currently at on
> this is if you're in a situation where all you understand mapwise is OSM
> and you're in an emergency situation where the destination now is
> "anywhere", then OSM is better than nothing, having at least runway
> centerlines (and preferably the same for taxiways) and perimeters is better
> (you can at least make a ballpark estimate of what *might* be a
> survivable landing).  This of course, with the tacit understanding that we
> are not the FAA (or whatever authority of record is relevant regionally)
> and no rational pilot worth his flight credentials would use it for more
> than the absolute most preliminary steps of planning.  Or as a decently
> accurate map for Flightgear, since that flight simulator uses OSM data for
> scenery already.
>
> From the ground, this isn't quite as important other than, say, being at
> even a moderately sized airport like OSU in Norman or Riverside in Jenks
> (both Oklahoma) where you might meet a friend in their plane at a specific
> tiedown and not be sure where to drive inside the airport to the
> appropriate tiedown/hangar.  Or at moderately large to huge airports,
> finding a specific airport-related industry and residences only accessible
> from a specific access in the perimeter (common with charter operators,
> maintenance hangars, general aviation, military operators, etc; and
> probably accounts for at least a hundred miles of near-airport GPXs and a
> couple dozen miles of inside-perimeter GPX for me).
>
> Bonus round a few years ago, attendees to Oklacon discovered the hard way
> that Watonga Regional Airport is 1) a runway capable of emergency landing a
> small commercial jetliner,  and 2) not secured.  Plus on at least one
> commercial map provider, had it's taxiways, accesses and runways mapped as
> a roadway, causing one especially confused person unfamiliar with the area
> (or airports in general) to drive the length of the runway.   Fortunately,
> Watonga's a *sllloooow* airport, and I don't recall hearing about anybody
> or any flights in imminent danger (as was the case when Meigs unexpectedly
> closed), so the incident only caused one person to be nicknamed Launchpad
> for a couple days.  So having the airports properly tagged could be just as
> important to *avoid* unintended traversal of airports as it can be to
> intentionally navigate to a specific airport location.
>
>
>> Given that map roulette is now handling these, I think this is a great
>> time to revisit this discussion. If maprouletters can change all these
>> point aerodromes to a polygon, then we can subjectively define airport
>> importance using the shape size.
>>
>
> I'm all in favor of mapping these as polygons and mapping the
> on-the-ground features, and possibly ground-based beacons where the
> identities can be independently verified (shouldn't be hard, tune to it on
> a capable radio, listen for the morse ident; in the midwest where there's
> basically noting but tilled field, these might also serve as a potential
> landmark as much as a lone tree does).  There's not much point in trying to
> map flight restrictions or paths, though, since there's no real good way to
> identify from the ground what these are.
>
> Like lakes and parks, editors probably ought to show a visible warning
> that things are Not Right when mapped as a node.
>


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