[OSM-talk] Route/flight tag

[Simon Hewison]

Paul Youlten wrote:
> I think it has value to OSM - just think of the thousands of people that 
> fly every day.
> 
> Clearly there is a lot of variation in the flight paths - but with 
> enough data, combined with altitude information you could make a useful 
> map for people thinking of buying a house near an airport (for example).

The openstreetmap schema isn't really suited to this information. Certainly, 
the raw trackpoints don't makes sense for this. And with regard to noise 
maps, these are quite often already available, measured not by GPS 
tracklogs, but by microphones. Not all airliners are as noisy as each other; 
for instance, the new A380 is reportedly much quieter than a Boeing 747, and 
the noise profile changes by the method of approach as well - continuous 
descent paths which are nowadays common are a lot quieter than a stepped 
descent - because the engine power is pretty constant.

You would need to collect tracklogs from thousands of different flights to 
make something that looks vaguely like a noise map, and even then all you 
produce is an assumed noise map, rather than an actual noise map.

-- 
Simon Hewison