Old Airports

January 8th, 2020
maps, transit
One thing I enjoy about aerial imagery is that you can see traces of how cities used to be. Tracing the spaces left behind by old train lines is a lot of fun, but recently I've been looking at some airports:

Old Saint-Pierre Airport (link), now with housing:

Old Jijiga Airport (link), also with housing, mostly recognizable as a piece of the street grid that doesn't match:

Old Guangzhou Airport (link), barely visible:

Old Quito Airport (link), now a large park and very visible. I think this the airport we used when we visited Ecuador in 2012:

Old Rio Branco Airport (link) is now a road:

Old Austin Airport (link) is very hard to recognize. All the ones above were single-runway, but Mueller airport had two large runways at an angle. Single-runway ones stand out a lot more, but this is still visible as a section of the city that doesn't really fit:

Old Lima Airport (link) closed sixty years ago and has been completely built over. But the runways survive as a pair of crossing roads:

There's a list on Wikipedia but my favorites are ones where I've been looking at an aerial photo and thought "there has to have been an airport there!"

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for March

Each red dot represents ten people who depend on the U.S.

via Thing of Things April 9, 2025

Advice for time management as a manager

have accurate expectations of yourself • prioritize ruthlessly • unemploy your future self • a five-step “help, I’m overwhelmed” checklist • carve out focused time

via benkuhn.net April 1, 2025

Product in the age of AI

We’re seeing AI features pop up in every product we use. Slack, Google Drive, etc.

via Home March 18, 2025

more     (via openring)