Locate airports by radius from a given airport

"Matt Whiting" wrote in message
...

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.


AeroPlanner.com

http://makeashorterlink.com/?I31E25C2D

Steven P. McNicoll wrote:
"Matt Whiting" wrote in message
...

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.



AeroPlanner.com

http://makeashorterlink.com/?I31E25C2D

Bingo! Thanks, Steven.

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.

Matt Whiting wrote:

You can't spend $8 on a WAC chart? G Your school or FBO doesn't
have one on the wall that you can use for free?

Yes, and yes. However, I was going to do the flight planning tomorrow
and I can't get a WAC that quickly (the "local" FBO doesn't stock them)
and the FBO is 35 miles away and I'd rather not drive 70 miles with gas
prices at $3/gallon if I don't have to.

Maybe I'm being a little silly here, but I'm thinking a commercial pilot
should be up to a higher level of flight planning. Your boss is going to
say, "I need to be in XYZ for a 9:00 AM meeting; get me there". It's your
job to figure out a good airport that's close to XYZ, has approaches
appropriate for the weather, all needed services available, ground
transport arranged for, and worked into the schedule, etc. Nowhere in that
scenario does "the dog ate my chart" seem like a useful thing to say.

Of course, the PTS doesn't require any of this, it's just the way my
instructor treated me when I was training for the commercial. He wanted to
see me thinking and acting like a commercial pilot, not just learning how
to fly a bunch of silly maneuvers and do a slightly-warmed over repeat of a
private pilot X/C.

All that being said, you can find on-line sectionals at
http://skyvector.com/

PS, I've only trained one person for the Commercial, and for the X/C we
decided to fly to Montreal. I figured learning how to deal with
international flight plans and customs was appropriate for a commercial
pilot. We blew a lot of money on dinner (and the cab rides into Old Town
Montreal), but the meal we had sure beat the heck out of any airport coffee
shop I've ever eaten in. We flew VFR both ways, and my student's flight
planning was excellent. At one point, we were over a broken deck, and were
spotting landmarks through holes in the clouds dead-on when his flight log
said we should. We flew back at night, and by that time it was crystal
clear. In the wilds of upstate NY, we were seeing airport beacons 50 miles
out. The entire trip, both ways, was done 100% pilotage and DR. We almost
didn't find ALB, and were just getting ready to break down and tune in the
VOR when we spotted the airport and managed to save the shutout.

AeroPlanner.com

http://makeashorterlink.com/?I31E25C2D

Excellent....

David

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.

Google maps... looks like Minneapolis, Omaha are too far.
There is a distance calculator
at http://www.airnav.com/airport/KLEM


"Matt Whiting" wrote in message
...
|
| 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

"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

Roy Smith wrote:

Matt Whiting wrote:


You can't spend $8 on a WAC chart? G Your school or FBO doesn't
have one on the wall that you can use for free?

Yes, and yes. However, I was going to do the flight planning tomorrow
and I can't get a WAC that quickly (the "local" FBO doesn't stock them)
and the FBO is 35 miles away and I'd rather not drive 70 miles with gas
prices at $3/gallon if I don't have to.


Maybe I'm being a little silly here, but I'm thinking a commercial pilot
should be up to a higher level of flight planning. Your boss is going to
say, "I need to be in XYZ for a 9:00 AM meeting; get me there". It's your
job to figure out a good airport that's close to XYZ, has approaches
appropriate for the weather, all needed services available, ground
transport arranged for, and worked into the schedule, etc. Nowhere in that
scenario does "the dog ate my chart" seem like a useful thing to say.

I don't disagree, but there are two reasons I'm not too worried about it
at present.

1. I just learned I would be able to get next week off on vacation and
am trying to get my commercial flight training accelerated into next
week as much as possible as I'm taking a masters program and have only
one week between semesters. I wasn't planning to fly next week until a
couple of days ago.

2. I have no plans to ever actually fly commercially (I make way more
than almost any commercial pilot as an engineering manager). I'm
getting the license purely for the challenge and to have an excuse to
fly and train. So, I'm probably not "thinking commercially" because I
have no plans to fly commercially.


Matt

RST Engineering wrote:

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.

Check out the link to aeroplanner than Steven posted. Looks to be much
better than Airnav in this regard at least.

Matt