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How I Identify an Airport

10th March 2024

Step by Step Photo Detective

My wife often thinks of me as a nerd and she’s correct for the most part.

I tend to take a windows seat when flying. While others are napping during the flight I’m viewing the scenery below.

Every once in a while I’ll spot a familiar pattern on the ground so I’ll pull my small camera from my pocket and take a picture. The pattern below is an airport with the straight line runway(s). I’ve repeated this action many times over the years that I’ve flown.

Of course it isn’t always easy to determine the name of the airport in the photograph. But I’ve pieced together a way to help me identify the airport.

If you too are a little “nerdy” and know a little about longitude and latitude, please follow along as I explain the technique that I use.

For illustration I’ll use a recent flight from Denver to my home base in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I was flying on this Boeing 737 Max on February 6, 2024 on United Airlines flight 2637 (DEN-GRR).

Onboard the aircraft, the seat back display shows the progress of our flight from Denver.

While this is one way to approximate your location when you snap a photo, it isn’t precise enough.

This is the unretouched photograph that I took from my window seat as we were flying at 35,000 ft – or about 7 miles above the ground. You can see the single runway just to the north of the bend in the road.

I’m sitting on the left side of the aircraft looking to the north. Keeping the aircraft’s altitude in mind the airport is quite distant from the plane’s flight path, perhaps by 15 miles or more.

The other steps that I used to identify the airport were made after I returned home. The first task was to edit the photograph to make it clearer.

Using my editing software I cropped the important part of the photo and was able to make the runway and surroundings much clearer.

I also checked the timestamp of the original photograph and found that it was taken on March 6, 2024 at about 1:23 PM.

My next step was to go to the website flightaware.com. This website has a multitude of aircraft information including the statistics of our UAL 2637 flight. As you’ll see, we will first find our flight for February 6th and then examine the details.

At the flightaware.com menu we searched for the UAL 2637 flight and chose the one from Wednesday February 6.

Choosing this flight and clicking takes us to the screen below.

After we verify that this is the desired flight we scroll down

Here the entire path of the completed flight from Denver to Grand Rapids (DEN-GRR) is displayed.

At the bottom of this display I clicked on View Track Log button.

Flightaware records the aircraft’s position every 30 seconds in the Track Log. We scroll through the Track Log to the approximate time that matches the photo’s timestamp we can see that the aircraft was at 41.8177 latitude and -91.1543 latitude at about 1:23pm.

The next step is to use Google Maps to find the aircraft’s location on the map for this latitude and longitude.

Google determines that at that time the aircraft was flying over the area just to the north of Tipton, Iowa.

The website vfrchart.com has the aircraft charts for the United States (and more). In the upper left corner of the site I have typed tipton, ia and chosen Sectionals from the drop down selections to display a portion of the sectional chart. Tipton is in the center with other airports in the vicinity of Tipton. An airport is surrounded by a dark rust color circle.

The hard work is to determine which of the airports is the one in the photo. Knowing that the aircraft is flying mostly eastward and the photo is north of our track (looking out of the left window of the aircraft), the possible airports are north of Tipton. In our case the one airport directly north of Tipton is the Monticello airport.

To make sure, I used Google Maps to display the Monticello Airport.

Here’s the map of the area where you can see the airport layout and the bend in the adjacent road.

So we’ve positively identified the Monticello Regional Airport KMXO.

So these are the steps that I use to identify airports that I photograph from the air.

Again I’ll say that this is a nerdy exercise, but taking photos out of the aircraft’s window is preferable to napping.

By the way, I have a collection of airports that I’ve taken from above. You can see these airports at my other website here https://arnielee.com/wordpress/?p=6049.

Written by:

Arnie Lee

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