Proposal talk:Aerodrome 3

I support this proposal. --Dktue (talk) 15:09, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Proposal mandatory announcements

Just a reminder that there are a number of announcements the proposer is responsible for Proposal_process#Mandatory_announcements. Adavidson (talk) 04:43, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not very familiar with it. Can you help me with this? It's my first proposal. --geozeisig (talk) 14:55, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Regional/International terminology

If I'm reading the proposal correctly, the "regional" and "international" tags have nothing to do with whether the airport has international service (or whether it's named "International Airport"), but actually relates to the types of planes that are supported. This seems like a recipe for confusion.

If we're doing a large retagging anyway, would it not be better to switch to more logical tag names? Gaelan Steele (talk) 11:59, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

The term "international" stands for international aerodromes but you shouldn't make it dependent on the name "International Airport". Perhaps it can be determined by the presence of an ILS (Instrumentenlandesystem). Does anyone have a suggestion?

Perhaps the following sentence was confusing: If a small aerodrome is close to a border and there are also flights across the border, it should still not be used aerodrome=international, it depends more on the maximum take-off weight. This must be judged with the right feeling. I can't think of any better expressions for "regional" and "international" at the moment.--geozeisig (talk) 15:47, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

*=international doesn't express the difference between continent of small countries (Europe) vs continent-spanning large countries well. I prefer separating the existence of international flights, and the reach. Airline hubs, flag carriers, and airlines of other countries may also help.
—— Kovposch (talk) 08:18, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Things the proposal ought to cover

Discuss how it affects heliports (if at all) Discuss how it affects military facilities, and shared civilian / military facilities. Mention how it affects disused aerodromes (if at all, and however tagged) SomeoneElse (talk) 14:06, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

How I currently do this classification without this tag

https://github.com/SomeoneElseOSM/SomeoneElse-style/blob/master/style.lua#L9542

SomeoneElse (talk) 14:06, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

The proposal does not affect heliport. We use aeroway=heliport.

For a military airfield we use landuse=military + military=airfield. If an airfield is used for civil and military purposes, it should be made into two parts and tagged accordingly. A tag aerodrome:type=military should be changed to military=airfield.

That isn't what the data in OSM says: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/aerodrome%3Atype#values . If you believe that a mechanical edit from aerodrome:type=military is justified then you should propose that separately as a mechanical edit, following the policy on the wiki. SomeoneElse (talk) 01:37, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

The proposal has no effect on disused airfields. --geozeisig (talk) 15:14, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

:type

I think it's important not to use the key aerodrome:type=* Type is too generic and may hinder future redefinition. When we use type, we don't know whether we're talking about the volume of traffic (whether passenger or freight), its importance on an international scale, whether it's civil or military, public or private, or a whole host of other things. I suggest aerodrome:importance=* or aerodrome:traffic=*

Gendy54 (talk) 15:22, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Commercial vs Private/General Aviation Airports

Thanks for working on this. I welcome an improvement in tagging airports in OSM, and using the aerodrome=* tag while deprecating aerodrome:type=* seems the right start. However, if you are formally proposing aerodrome=*, it strikes me as an opportunity to clarify, and possibly even elaborate on, the categories, which in my opinion is one of the major pitfalls of the current tagging scheme that prevents it from gaining widespread use. To illustrate more concretely, I do not really think the proposed tagging captures the differences between three airports near me:

• Los Angeles International Airport: this is a massive airport, with >70 million annual passengers and daily flights to multiple continents. There are 4 runways, and essentially any existing plane can land at it. This is obviously the highest class of airport possible, and under this it would be tagged aerodrome=international.
• Burbank Airport: this is a much smaller airport than LAX, with about 6 million annual passengers. There are no customs facilities, so it only serves destinations within the United States. The largest jets cannot land on its 2 runways, and so most of its commercial flights are to destinations within a couple of hours in flight time, with rare longer scheduled flights to the central and eastern parts of the US. There is one terminal building. Colloquially, this is certainly a "regional airport", so I think it would be tagged aerodrome=regional.
• Santa Monica Airport: only very small planes can land at this airport's one short runway, so it has no commercial flights (although in more sparsely populated regions, an airport of this size could host commercial flights). There is a "terminal" building, though there are no gates, and a tower. This is colloquially referred to as a "general aviation" airport in the US, though I have no idea if that term is used elsewhere in the world or not. I think under this scheme it would still be tagged aerodrome=regional, which feels wrong to me: this is not the same kind of airport as Burbank, which accommodates normal passenger planes.

In my opinion, I think these represent three clearly distinct categories of airports, so I would prefer there to be a third, smaller category than "regional". Perhaps aerodrome=minor or =local would be a good fit? I would suggest aerodrome=general_aviation, but that seems like it runs into issues with very small airports that host commercial flights in remote regions, or at least it did in the last proposal. But if there had to be only two categories, I think Burbank is more similar to LAX than it is to Santa Monica, especially in terms of its importance to the average map-user. Applying aerodrome=international to a non-international airport strikes me as so counter-intuitive as to be a Trolltag, so maybe the name should be changed to something less specific like "major"? At the very least, it'd be good to highlight the intended usage of each tag, maybe with examples and edge cases.

I also feel, though not as strongly, that aerodrome=international is a confusing way to refer to the largest airports. In some regions with many small countries, even a small airport will be "international" (does the Netherlands even have domestic commercial flights?), but in regions with few large countries, relatively large airports may be domestic-only (like Burbank above, or even bigger airports like New York-La Guardia or Washington National). If the goal is to demarcate the biggest, world-class airports, I think a different value would be less confusing. Maybe something like aerodrome=intercontinental would be more clear?

As an aside, I have never heard of a "gliding" airport. According to taginfo, the value appears to be almost solely used in Germany/Central Europe. I guess it's fine to keep, since it has current usage, but to me it is strange to give such a niche value its own category and leave only two for every other kind of airport! --Willkmis (talk) 20:18, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Edge cases

Time to pull out some examples from my collection of airport edge cases:

• Allakaket Airport appears to be aerodrome=gliding despite being primarily for scheduled passenger flights and not having a single glider based there: it doesn't have a tower, a terminal building, fuel, or even runway lights. It does have a windsock, though.
• Gander International Airport has little traffic of its own, but is capable of handling aircraft of any size, because it's the main emergency diversion airport for flights across the north Atlantic. Would it be "international" from size, or "regional" from traffic?
• Van Nuys Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, but it doesn't have a single scheduled commercial flight, passenger or freight. How would you classify it?
• Eckhart International. Thousand-meter grass runway, a windsock, and customs facilities.

The proposed values, and to some extnt, their definitions, really only make sense for a subset of Europe. The US, in particular, has the concept of a "general aviation" airport: an airport with no scheduled flights that serves primarily private single-engine aircraft. A typical GA airport will have fuel and some sort of terminal-like building, but won't have a tower and will generally not have any gliders operating from it.

--Carnildo (talk) 03:24, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Airstrips

Why define various types of aerodrome, but leave airstrip (& heliport as mentioned above) as aeroway= ?

For consistency, wouldn't it be better to go for a clean sweep & include them as well? --Fizzie41 (talk) 06:40, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

Can you help to improve the proposal?

Thanks for the new ideas. It seems that the 2 categories ("regional" and "international") are not enough and maybe we need 3. The naming is also not yet optimal. In my eyes, size does matter. Suggestions for designations would then be major, medium and minor. But maybe we'll start by collecting suggestions. We also need definitions of how the categories are described and how they differ from each other. --geozeisig (talk) 14:51, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

"Size" is not well-defined, and is not a good proxy for importance. By any measure other than traffic level (length of runway, number of runways, area covered, number of airplane parking spaces, etc), Grant County International is a bigger airport than Spokane International, but if you had to pick just one to draw on the map, Spokane International is by far the better choice. --Carnildo (talk) 19:15, 11 March 2024 (UTC)

It would be good to use the length of the runway to differentiate between the categories. This is easy for an OSM mapper to determine. Either there is already a tag length or you can determine it from the satellite image.

The Wikipedia article Runway also uses the terms small-, medium-size and large-size airports. --geozeisig (talk) 13:37, 12 March 2024 (UTC)

Have you looked at Proposal:Aerodrome ? international_flights=* (need to distinguish regular vs equipped or allowed) and flights_range=* (not well named). importance=international is not the same or good either, as it may not reflect small airports with limited or seasonal international flights. As mentioned *=international doesn't mix well with *=continental et al. I prefer inserting *=transcontinental and *=intercontinental somehow.
—— Kovposch (talk) 08:24, 12 March 2024 (UTC)