[Talk-us] recent change to Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ) not on current imagery

[Ed Hillsman]

As a “heads-up” to armchair mappers, I have added the following note to the Albuquerque, New Mexico wiki page https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Albuquerque,_New_Mexico, and passing it along here. Russ Biggs and I have mapped recent major changes at the airport that do not yet show up on available imagery and cannot be fully mapped until new imagery becomes available (walking along the fence of a military base/airport with a GPS device and binoculars not being as innocuous as in former days). We drew attention to this difference between ground and imagery in the description of the changeset. This is the kind of thing that armchair mappers frequently “fix”, and we’d like to try to head that off.

Ed Hillsman

in 2017 and 2018, the City of Albuquerque abandoned the north runway of its airport, removed the pavement, regraded the land, and added streets to convert the land into a commercial area for airport- and military-related businesses. As of June, 2018, the area is empty except for the new streets, which remain unnamed. These changes do not yet appear on available imagery but have been mapped into OpenStreetMap using GPS traces and photos from site visits. Some of the changes have occurred inside the airport/Air Force Base fence and cannot be checked this way. In particular, it is not possible to tell from outside the fence how far south the old runway and taxiway pavements have been removed. As appropriate, some of these changes have been tagged with FIXME and a note to review and, as needed, edit, when updated imagery becomes available or site visits yield additional information.