Latest site news

When you're logged into your account, look for the "Add a new airport" link in the left sidebar, and the "Edit" tab on airport pages. An amalgamated list of recent changes is available here:

http://www.ourairports.com/airports/changes.html

Very special thanks to contributor Raul Robledo for the data. I believe that we now have more airports listed for Brazil than for any other country except the U.S.

Members can now tag airports they've visited. Right now, they can see only a listing of airports for each tag, but a map will be available in the next couple of days. You can tag (for example) every airport you visited in a specific plane, or during a trip; you can tag places with good restaurants or cheap fuel; etc.

Most major airport lists (world, continent, country, region, and closest airports) can now be filtered. By default, the lists now filter out heliports, seaplane bases, and closed airports and show all active airports, but you can still view everything *or* view only airports/heliports/seaplane bases with airline service using the links at the top of the list. Here's an example, showing the airports with airline service closest to London City Airport:

http://www.ourairports.com/airports/EGLC/closest.html?show=scheduled

After two weeks of exhausting work, I've managed to flag over 3,000 airports that have scheduled airline service (at least according to Wikipedia). I'll continue to refine this.

Right now, a note appears at the top of each airport's right sidebar specifying whether it has airline service, and by tomorrow, there will be an extra "scheduled service" column in the CSV airport export. Soon I plan to do a lot more with this information, allowing different kinds of filtering, searches, etc.

As far as I know, OurAirports now has the only free listing of airports with scheduled service available online, in machine-readable form. I'll be grateful for any corrections.

I've just added 64 additional North Korean airports (there was only 1 before), using information from the FAS report here:

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/facility/air_base.htm

Many of them are just highway strips, but there are some well-constructed airfields. None has ICAO or IATA identifiers except for Sunan International in Pyongyang (the one that was originally present).

You can see the airports here:

http://www.ourairports.com/countries/KP/

Sometimes the airport icons can cover important details -- it is now possible to toggle icons on and off for all maps. Note that most maps now also have a reset link, so that you can jump back to the default view after panning and zooming.

KML is now also available for the world, continent, and region maps.

I've improved the search algorithms a bit to try to guess at misspellings. For example, if you accidentally leave the 'i' out of "florida", you'll still get results:

http://www.ourairports.com/search?q=florda

There are now tabs listing members with home airports in a specific region, country, or continent, so it's easy to find other members near you (or near where you're going). For example, here's a listing of all members in Europe:

http://www.ourairports.com/continents/EU/members.html

And here's a listing of members in Massachusetts, USA:

http://www.ourairports.com/countries/US/MA/members.html

You can find members based at a specific airport by looking in the right sidebar on the airport's page.

I've added over 200 former Soviet air bases, mostly in Russia, but also in the Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Kazakhstan. Many of these have been abandoned (they're not all marked abandoned yet, but I'm working on it), some have been converted to civilian use, and some are still in military use. Most have no ICAO or IATA identifiers, and do not appear in any official civilian publications. Thanks to the many Wikipedia contributors for tracking these down.

This addition doubles the number of Russian airports to nearly 300. There must be many more in such a large country, but I haven't found a source yet.

Here's an example of an abandoned airstrip that was probably meant to serve in any conflict with China:

http://www.ourairports.com/airports/RU-0967/

There are now CSV-formatted files (you can load them into a spreadsheet or database) available for airports, countries, and regions, updated nightly. Use the "Downloads" link in the left sidebar, or go here:

http://www.ourairports.com/data/

I've just added more than 700 additional Western European airports for Ireland, the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Austria. These all come from Paul Tomblin's database at

http://www.navaid.com/

These include some North Sea oil platforms (mostly Norwegian) -- you can see them if you zoom in closely enough on the big map:

http://www.ourairports.com/big-map.html#lat=57.43312382526987,lon=4.449462890625,zoom=7,type=Hybrid

I've added 277 new German airports using data available from SoaringWeb.org -- although the info is over 10 years old, it looks pretty good from spot checks, and adds a lot of smaller airports that were missing from the DAFIF. Unfortunately, they're not categorized by state yet.

You can now find the closest airports to a latitude/longitude by entering the coordinates into the regular search field. Many different formats work, such as "45 30N 75 30W" or "45.5,-75.5". Here's an example:

http://www.ourairports.com/search?q=45.5+-75.5

Thanks to George Plews, who has painstakingly transcribed data for all the water aerodromes in the Canadian Water Aerodrome Supplement, there are now 321 new Canadian seaplane bases at OurAirports. George's web site is here:

http://www.plews.ca/AirportsinCanada.htm

The site has just added 507 seaplane bases from the U.S., and 5,911 heliports from the U.S. and Canada. I'll add seaplane bases and heliports from the rest of the world as soon as I find a public data source.

I've just added the ability for members to define new places around an airport (such as FBOs, fuel pumps, parking, restaurants, customs, bus stops, etc.), and for any visitors to leave comments about those places. It's a bit rough still, but it seems to be working. A list of places defined (if any) appears in the right sidebar under the airport info.

Currently, only the member who first defines a place can edit or tag it, but I plan to make place-management collaborative, like Wikipedia, so that anyone can add tags. Anyone -- even an anonymous flyer -- can leave comments on the places, just as with airports (in fact, the comments roll up to the airport comments automatically).

The ability for members to add new airports and edit existing ones is also coming soon.

You can now view an entire comment thread (a comment and its replies) by selecting the "view thread" link in any comment. When I have more time, I'll indent them to show the different subthreads. Here's an example:

http://www.ourairports.com/comments/threads/382/

Welcome to the new news and announcements system in OurAirports -- you can use this to stay up to date on the site's latest developments. To subscribe to these announcements as a blog, point your weblog reader to http://www.ourairports.com/news/feed.rss

I'm planning a lot of enhancements to the site soon, including user annotations on maps (with comments, of course) and an ability to invite other members as trusted friends. Stay tuned!