With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

...I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, day one!

2005 April 10 11:12

Aviation has an interesting relationship to newfangled stuff; computers and the like. While new gadgets are certainly in use in a lot of airplanes, anything that goes into a vehicle that flys folks around the sky (even more so when they're paying you) has to be certified to a very high degree.

Web-based means of doing things have been slow to take hold, but they are quite available nowdays. I'd like to highlight a couple of web sites that I use for looking up airports. This morning I became interested in finding out what airports are in Bellingham, Washington. It turns out that Bellingham has a nice little class D airport not too far north of Seattle.

Here are the two web sites. First, aeroplanner.com. Aeroplanner allows you to look at official air navigation charts on-line. You can zoom, pan, and input where you want to start by coordinates, or city name. It's very nice to find out what airports are near a city. The site also has flight planning interfaces. Some really nice features are available with paid subscriptions. I have a "premium" membership there. This allowe me to, for instance, look at the Terminal Area Chart for a large airport without having to order one (and of course the on-line ones are always up to date).

The other site is airnav.com. This site contains almost the exact same information as the Airport/Facility Directory, which is an official publication which lists specific information about airports.

So when I go to look up a town, whether to find out how I might fly to it or what airports would be close if I lived there, those are the sites I go to first.