Airports — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is somewhere aircraft land: airports, airfields, air bases and heliports. There are more than 46,000 worldwide. Click on any of them to see more details from OpenStreetMap, such as the IATA code, and who runs it. This data is only available if an OpenStreetMap editor added it to their database. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Each airfield is something added by a mapper at the OpenStreetMap website. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves.

What we include

Objects on OpenStreetMap have tags. We use these to decide what objects to put on the map, and to categorise and colour them:

`aeroway=aerodrome` is an airport or an airfield, which could be large or small. There are more than 45,000 of these. We split them up by whether they have an IATA code tag. If they do, they're typically bigger and we call them airports, which is about 20%. If they don't, we call them airfields, which is the other 80%.
`military=airfield` is an air base. There are more than 2,300.
`aeroway=heliport` is a landing site for helicopters alone. This could be a dedicated port, or just a helipad on a hospital or an oil rig. There are more than 750.
`aeroway=airport` is not selected. Although it seems like an obvious tag, it's not used at OpenStreetMap.

Runways, taxiways, terminals and aprons are not separate points. Where an airport is drawn as an outline, its runways lie inside that outline and are part of the shape rather than features of their own.

Colour

We use colour to categorise air bases, airports (larger), airfields (smaller) and heliports.

It would have been nice to colour the international airports separately, but not enough at OpenStreetMap have the necessary tags. Sometimes we can get additional data from Wikidata. In this case they have yearly passenger numbers for airports. But not enough have passenger information to reliably split them into larger and smaller, which is why we solely used the presence or absence of an IATA code.

Air bases

Air bases are shown here as on the airports layer, and also on the military sites map. Some of them are tagged as civil aerodromes as well, so on this map we call them air bases without explicitly saying whether they are military or not.

Size

Each dot is sized by the land area of the airfield, so bigger airfields get bigger dots. The median airfield is about 210,000 m². About half of all airfields are defined at OpenStreetMap as a single point rather than a shape, and for these we assume they're 200,000 m².

Where the map is empty

Our data for this layer relies fully on OpenStreetMap, so if somebody hasn't yet mapped an airfield, we don't show it. Mapping tends to be more complete in North America, Australia and western Europe than in west Africa or central Asia, so there are probably many airfields, especially smaller ones, missing from those areas.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. Sometimes disused locations stay mapped for a long time after they close.

Source and licence

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