Hello, The Mexican government publishes a list of airports that are licensed. These are airport that are able to be legally used by aircraft. The license status of the airports change from time to time. The airport may still be in the aerial imagery, and it would be handy to know they are there for emergency purposes, so keeping them in OSM seems like a good idea. This creates a situation where there the infrastructure is all there, but it is technically not legal to land at. Should this data be mapped in OSM? If so, would it be disused:aeroway=aerodrome and disused:aeroway=runway?
This happens in other countries as well. The general problem is how do we map airports that have infrastructure, but are technically closed or private use?
I haven’t done much mapping of airports at all, but my first inclination would be to just have the aeroway=aerodrome be marked with access=private or access=no, for the case where it’s still physically there and might be useful as a landmark, but shouldn’t be used by “the public”. I don’t know if that’s the best approach, or if any maps or other systems based on OSM data would indicate those any differently than an “open” airport, though.
Closest thing I could find was operator:type= but that is more for public/private/military – not really for access. For instance, you could have an airport that is private, but licensed, so I guess that would be operator:type=private, access=yes ?
It looks like there’s some, assuming my query is right (which is a big assumption), just not enough to reach taginfo’s most popular combinations list.
(when I try that link myself something is replacing my spaces with +, but the query is just nwr["aeroway"="aerodrome"]["access"]; out count;)
I suspect that lots of “general aviation” airports around the world are, strictly speaking, “access=private” although they may well be listed as somewhere to land at in an emergency?
Similarly I suspect that a number of the “unlicensed” airports here aren’t disused - they’re just used for purposes that aren’t always legal.
Maybe some sort of “designation” tag might work here? I’ve no idea what other countries do, but there are lots of aviation fans in OSM and I’m sure they’ll pop up to help real soon now…
In general, this key indicates the nature of the operator, not who can use it. operator:type=private would merely mean that a private entity operates the airfield, but it may or may not allow the public to land or take off from there and may or may not allow the public to otherwise access the facility.
If an airfield is being used by the public in practice but isn’t licensed to serve the public, that sounds like an informal arrangement to me. informal=yes would be a good fit, although I’m pretty sure no data consumer currently looks for the specific combination of aeroway=aerodrome and informal=yes.
To be fair, the Terms of Use covers that sort of thing as well (“… dangerous businesses such as emergency services or air traffic control, where the use or failure of the Services could lead to death, personal injury or significant property damage”). Obviously everyone reads the Ts and Cs in detail before signing up .
Once again, an example of what happens when you don’t define rules, quickly gets sidetracked.
Airports are structures to receive air traffic. If they exist, they must be mapped.
Airports can provide access to the public or be private, there is no doubt here.
Identifying whether an airport has a license or not only identifies an extra reason for it not to be accessible to the public.
There may be private airports without a license. That’s right, but identifying whether it is licensed or not, is irrelevant, in the end it will always continue to be for private use.
Companies are mapped every day, whether they are legally or not. An illegal company does not cease to exist and as far as I know OSM does not aim to monitor whether the mapped element is in a legal status or not.
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