Apologies if this has been dragged over extensively. The similar topics suggestions don’t seem to match anything.
For background, I’ve worked in open-source software communities for 20 years and have dealt with squabbles among conflicting experts in the past. I want to avoid name-calling and finger-pointing when I’m only a casual user and not a GIS pro. I’ve made some small edits in OSM in the past, mostly in my immediate, observable area. I’ve also contributed funds to OSM and downstream projects. So, I’m certainly an interested stakeholder. Which brings me to this subject.
Recently, someone has made large-scale edits in my area, tagging multiple locations as airports. This area is farmland and there are not the density of airports that you would be led to believe by the number of waypoints that have suddenly appeared in the area. One of these is on land adjacent to land we own and you won’t be landing anything larger than a quad drone there. Certainly nothing with landing gear.
The person making these edits is doing the same thing all over Oklahoma and also in Alaska. I suspect they are taking data for GPS towers used by farmers and calling them airports. I assume these towers require FAA registration and the person editing the map is using that data and calling the location an “airport”. Many of these are on land owned by several members of the same family and all have their name attached. Their farm operations are fairly high-tech, so it makes sense that they would have ground-based GPS augmentation.
There are several features beyond pinpoints where taxiways of airports are shown in OSM. There are no taxiways on at least 2 of these properties. Not even the rough kind of dirt track where you could land an ultralight or crop duster. They are fence lines with rough tracks where a pickup or oil-field truck have driven.
Is it standard practice to directly contact someone and ask them to explain their edits? Is there some type of oversight committee of GIS pros that can review these edits? Yes, I know I can just go in and delete them, but I want to do what is right by data integrity and correctness.
For the record, my user name is ericcl and most of my edits are around the community of Hydro, Oklahoma, USA. You should see the extent of the issue within a 15km circle of this town. Within that circle, there is 1 public airport (KOJA) and 2 private airports.
Normally I’d suggest “comment on a changeset discussion”, since that’s a good way of asking them about their sources so you can both understand each other’s point of view. Asking them to discuss in this forum is also good.
However, the person that I think you are referring to hasn’t replied to anyone since 2020, so I’d instead suggest to email data@openstreetmap.org to explain the problem. Someone there** will be able to send them a message that they have to read before continuing to edit, and if they ignore that, take further action. They only edit once a week or so, so it might take a little while.
Once normal communications have been resumed I’d then comment on specific data issues.
** I’m a member of that group, but sending an email means that everyone will see it.
I am curious, if this is a problem of the mapper or of his or here sources. I had a quick look on Kits Airport and noticed that there was a wikidata q-number as well. Both are showing the same faa number leading to this Aeronautical Information Services information page (KITS)
I checked a couple more and they all got marked on their Aeronautical Information Services information page as operational airports. The ones I looked at even have runway information on them.
In this case, are you referring to something like Kits Airport? The faa=5OK0 tag refers to this FAA record about a private turf airstrip 1,050 feet long and 40 feet wide (320×12 m). The FAA coordinates are slightly to the north of where the mapper put the aeroway=aerodrome in OSM, pointing to a plausible location for the runway:
I recall when similar features were added to my neck of the woods in bulk many years ago. I had no idea that such facilities existed so close to me and was tempted to delete all of them. Some of them checked out, while others were clearly outdated FAA records; the runway had been plowed under for a residential subdivision a few years earlier.
I would map the runways that still exist, tagging them with accurate surface=* values, so that fellow mappers and data consumers would be able to tell what the aeroway=aerodrome point refers to. aerodrome:type=private would distinguish this airstrip from the actual airports. There’s also a discussion (in German) about whether to replace this key with aerodrome=*. These tags won’t necessarily prevent the default map style (“OSM Carto”) from marking them like airports or the built-in search engine (“Nominatim”) from labeling them as an “aerodrome”, but some other applications may recognize the tags and suppress them when you’re looking for actual airports.
Most of the edits by this user appear to be manual retagging of existing features that had previously been imported from other sources such as OurAirports and Geonames, and they attempted to clean up surrounding features too. If there were lots of new additions, it would be better to discuss the edits informally with the local community (such as in United States) beforehand.
Indeed - but the onus should be on the person adding these “paper airports” to determine if they do actually exist before doing so. I had a similar issue locally to me, and I would estimate that 50% of those simply did not exist as actual airports. In many cases a farmer might have let someone with access to a plane to use their field once or twice, and it might have got recorded on some list in the 50s or 60s, but there’s nothing left now.
Fortunately the FAA database is a little better than that, but it is still a problem. At a glance, I suspect the mapper did honestly try to hand-verify what they were adding, because they could’ve added a lot more based on what’s in Wikidata, and they also improved the map around some of the added airstrips. For example, they added the house and driveway to the south of “Kits Airport”. Someone unfamiliar with aviation could look at that house’s backyard and conclude that nothing’s there anymore, but then again, it doesn’t take very much land to take off in a small crop duster. Of course, rather than speculating, we could ask the mapper directly.
How interesting. Kits Airport is one of the ones in question. In your screenshot, there is a home with a pond. I know this family well and they don’t operate aircraft. Several of the other entries in the area are from their family members of the same last name.
Just knowing the terrain and from being active in the community, I’ve never witnessed nor heard of aircraft taking off from any of these. To the south-east of this one a few km is one called Lawles. That’s a fence-row that shows as a landing strip. If some poor pilot in distress was making for that location, they’re going to be in trouble. (I know, professional pilots don’t rely on OSM, but some yahoo in an ultralight or a crop duster might).
Thank you all for the replies. I’ll follow up on your actions in the coming weeks.
The problem here is actually that people have been doing that and haven’t had a reply since 2020. It might be that their email is broken, and we just need to get their attention - hence my reply above.
I spoke to the person whose home is due south of Kits Airport. From the conversation, I realized these designations were used to prevent the construction of wind turbines about 10 years ago.
I followed the instructions in an earlier comment and read this page for guidance. I added three fields to them and I hope the companies that process the data will use these to suppress showing them as active runways.
My interest in this was because the latest update to maps in OSMand shows these things scattered all over my local area and it aggravates me greatly. Both from a visual clutter perspective, but also knowing that those features don’t exist except in a government database.
I think you misunderstood the format of lifecycle prefixes such as disused: or abandoned: These aren’t stand-alone tags, they work in combination with other tags. You were probably going for abandoned:aeroway=aerodrome
I think you misunderstood the format of lifecycle prefixes
Entirely possible. I was using the interactive editor. When I typed abandoned, it didn’t offer to autofill anything other than the word abandoned. I’ll certainly take the advice of those who know better.
On the wiki page, I interpreted the instructions to set the tag as shown above.
For features which can only be returned to use with significant repair efforts, use the prefix abandoned:*=* instead.
I’ll be careful so as not to get too political or potentially say something potentially slanderous. These airport designations were created to block wind turbine construction and the person I spoke with made that clear. There are several legitimate private fields in the area, but none of these have ever, or will ever, have a working landing strip. I didn’t delete any of the items, but I did add clarifying metadata.
Given what I know of these land owners, they probably didn’t think of this tactic themselves.
The * is just a placeholder to be replaced according to the context (and used rather loosely in this case to stand in for two different values). There should never be a * in the actual tag value stored. So in this case the key is disused:aeroway and the value is aerodrome (or it could be runway if you are modifying a runway object).
(I’m not sure how you arrived at the xml format with <tag k etc. - it’s technically correct but not how most contributors see the data. For most purposes it’s fine to write simply disused:aeroway = aerodrome rather than spelling out the xml).
