Locate airports by radius from a given airport

Does anyone know of a good way to locate airports that are 200 miles or
more from a given airport? I realize a large planning chart with a
circle drawn would be easy, but I don't have one of those handy. I need
to plan a 200 mile cross country for my commercial day/night long cross
country and want to look for airports at least 200, but less than say
300 miles from KELM. I figure someone somewhere knows of software which
will do this, but I'm not away of any.


Matt

In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:

Does anyone know of a good way to locate airports that are 200 miles or
more from a given airport? I realize a large planning chart with a
circle drawn would be easy, but I don't have one of those handy. I need
to plan a 200 mile cross country for my commercial day/night long cross
country and want to look for airports at least 200, but less than say
300 miles from KELM. I figure someone somewhere knows of software which
will do this, but I'm not away of any.


Matt

Quickie cheating way is to log into DUATS and ask for a defined radius
briefing around your origin, asking for TAF's. You'll get a list of all
the airports with TAF's. Of course, drawing a circle on a WAC chart is not
only more traditional, but probably a lot more fun.

My commercial X/C was White Plains to Key West in a 172 (no A/P).

Roy Smith wrote:

In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:


Does anyone know of a good way to locate airports that are 200 miles or
more from a given airport? I realize a large planning chart with a
circle drawn would be easy, but I don't have one of those handy. I need
to plan a 200 mile cross country for my commercial day/night long cross
country and want to look for airports at least 200, but less than say
300 miles from KELM. I figure someone somewhere knows of software which
will do this, but I'm not away of any.


Matt


Quickie cheating way is to log into DUATS and ask for a defined radius
briefing around your origin, asking for TAF's. You'll get a list of all
the airports with TAF's. Of course, drawing a circle on a WAC chart is not
only more traditional, but probably a lot more fun.

That may be a clever way to do it. Yes, and if I had a WAC on hand I
would do it that way.

My commercial X/C was White Plains to Key West in a 172 (no A/P).

I guess you got the 200 miles easy enough! :-) I think you are located
about 200 miles from ELM, any airports you'd recommend that have a
decent restaurant? The plan is to fly out late in the day, spend some
time chowing down while the sun sets and then fly back for the night 200
miles.

Matt

In article ,
Matt Whiting wrote:

I think you are located about 200 miles from ELM, any airports you'd
recommend that have a decent restaurant? The plan is to fly out late in
the day, spend some time chowing down while the sun sets and then fly
back for the night 200 miles.

Starting about 50 miles SW of HPN, Sky Manor (Pittstown, NJ) has a nice
restaurant. Added bonuses are the collection of tropical birds in cages
outside (at least during the summer), and some guy on the field has
imported a couple of Russian twin-engine seaplanes that he's trying to fix
up; they're on the ramp so you can gawk at them (I think they made the
cover of AOPA Pilot a while ago).

A little closer, in northern NJ, Lincoln Park, Blairstown, and Greenwood
lake all have small restaurants on the field. I use all of them on a
semi-regular basis for BFRs (fly there, do the ground work over lunch, then
fly back). Of the bunch, I think Lincoln Park is the nicest, if you were
looking for real food. Not sure I would recommend Lincoln Park for a night
departure if you're unfamiliar with the airport; small runway, complicated
airspace, and close-in terrain.

Sky Acres (Millbrook, NY) has another nice little restaurant, overlooking
the runway (another good BFR destination). The word around my flying club
is that the new restaurant in Orange County, NY is pretty good, but I
haven't been there myself yet.

Dutchess County used to have a place called the Woronock House that was
excellent; it's since changed hands and I don't like the food as much.
Park at the BP pumps, and you can walk to a gate in the fence which leads
to the restaurant. These days, I suspect you need an escort from the
airport to get through the gate. As you might suspect from my lack of
familiarity with the current procedures, I don't frequent that much any
more (like I said, the food isn't as good as it used to be).

A really class act is Columbia County. Walk to a gate in the fence at the
north-west corner of the airport and there's an excellent restaurant. They
do a nice lunch buffet (maybe just on weekends?), and have a full menu. Of
all the places I've mentioned, this is the best, food-wise. No runway
view, however.

On all of these, I really only know about lunch. Some may not even be open
for dinner. Best call ahead.

" Does anyone know of a good way to locate airports that are 200 miles or
more from a given airport? I realize a large planning chart with a circle
drawn would be easy, but I don't have one of those handy. I need to plan
a 200 mile cross country for my commercial day/night long cross country
and want to look for airports at least 200, but less than say 300 miles
from KELM. I figure someone somewhere knows of software which will do
this, but I'm not away of any.


Matt
Are you an AOPA member?
Their flight planner will give you distance.
Do you have a few old sectionals sitting around?
My old flight school had old sectionals on the walls
with a string marking mileage to quickly figure out
a radius from our airfield.

David

Airnav has a feature where you can search airports between two
user-specified radii. However, the maximum radius appears to be 200NM.
So, you can search airports between 100NM and 200NM.


Matt Whiting wrote:
Does anyone know of a good way to locate airports that are 200 miles or
more from a given airport? I realize a large planning chart with a
circle drawn would be easy, but I don't have one of those handy. I need
to plan a 200 mile cross country for my commercial day/night long cross
country and want to look for airports at least 200, but less than say
300 miles from KELM. I figure someone somewhere knows of software which
will do this, but I'm not away of any.


Matt

Google Earth will show airports.
-jim

Andrew Sarangan wrote:

Airnav has a feature where you can search airports between two
user-specified radii. However, the maximum radius appears to be 200NM.
So, you can search airports between 100NM and 200NM.

That's unfortunate as it sounds like exactly what I was looking for. A
way to sort airports by distance so I could look for ones with the
facilities I was after, namely a decent restaurant in this case.

Thanks,
Matt

I just looked for that feature, Andrew, and couldn't find it. Could you
give us a little more detail on where it is?

Jim


"Andrew Sarangan" wrote in message
oups.com...
Airnav has a feature where you can search airports between two
user-specified radii. However, the maximum radius appears to be 200NM.
So, you can search airports between 100NM and 200NM.

"RST Engineering" wrote in message
...
I just looked for that feature, Andrew, and couldn't find it. Could you
give us a little more detail on where it is?

You can use the full form at:
http://www.airnav.com/airports/search.html
That's the form you get if you click on the "Advanced Search" button on the
"Airports" page.

Interestingly, the range options don't update when you change the units (km,
nm, or sm). Of course, that doesn't help here, since a nautical mile is the
longest unit available. But it means people wanting to work in km (for
example) are getting short-changed.

There's a shorter version here where you can enter the distances as text,
rather than picking from a list:
http://www.airnav.com/cgi-bin/airport-search

Unfortunately, the range limit isn't just in the form UI itself; it appears
that the CGI script enforces it too. If you enter a distance more than
200NM, a form comes back to get you to enter the distance again. I'm
guessing they do this in order to limit the work the database has to do (as
the range goes up, the number of potential hits goes up dramatically).

It is kind of ironic, given the regulatory requirement for a 200NM leg, that
200NM would be the upper bound for their search. I suspect there's a
chance that if someone sent them some email and explained why 300 or 400 NM
might be more useful to people doing the cross-country selection for a pilot
certificate, they might increase the limit.

Now, all that said...

I did a 100-200NM search from my home airport, and even with the shorter
distance, 86 airports showed up. Limiting that to paved airports with fuel
cut that in half, but it's still clear that a 200-300NM search (covering an
area almost twice as great) is going to produce a very large number of
choices. I'd say that a pure radius-based search may not really be as
useful as one might hope...it's better to start with at least an idea of a
general direction or destination, and using a chart makes this sort of
search easy.

As for the the WAC not being available...I'm not sure why the WAC was
mentioned specifically. All of my certificate-requirement
long-cross-country flights were doable on a single sectional. Even if one
doesn't have a WAC handy (and frankly, this is a good example of why you
ought to buy one at least once...they can be very useful), the sectional
chart that every pilot ought to have handy should be sufficient.

Pete