Birds-eye view of 6,000 airports around the world

This may be advertorial (and not for Boing Boing, we're not involved)—but it's really good stuff. GE produced a satellite, birds-eye view of the 6,000 most popular airports around the world. Filter by busiest, most scenic, interesting geometry and check out photos tagged to location. (thanks, Colin James Nagy)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: aviation • geo • map • Technology

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The Snowden Principle

mccrum

Doesn’t GE understand that giving away photos of airports is only giving information to enemy terrorists!

Seriously, if I have to deal with a security guard calling in the local PD because I have a camera on a tripod, GE needs to get called on the carpet too.
wizardru

This is pretty cool…but part of me wonders if this isn’t dangerous to make this kind of information so readily available. Is this sort of thing already in Google Maps, I suppose?
- mccrum
  
  Dangerous to whom? Seriously. I’d like to know how a photo of an airport from above could be construed as a danger.
  - http://www.kmoser.com kmoser
    
    Yeah, amateurs might try to use the images to land a plane, endangering themselves as well as those on the ground. They need a disclaimer saying, “Not to be used for aeronautical purposes.”
    - mccrum
      
      I like to think of good old Mathias Rust planning his escapade of landing in Red Square looking at people using Google Earth with a “Pfft, you have it so easy!”
  - travtastic
    
    Well, you know. For targeting your terrorism guided missiles.
RJ

I’ve lived in Atlanta all my life and never bothered to look at Hartsfield-Jackson on a satellite image before. It looks much more peaceful from up there than it does on the ground.

The presentation is basically one big advert for GE, but the images are interesting. A tremendous amount of work goes into design, construction and maintenance of those facilities. Maybe, a thousand years from now, some archaeologist will look at the buried outlines of our airports and be as impressed with our engineering abilities as we are with the ancient Egyptians and Neolithic builders.
dross1260

I’ve shopped DFW, Denver and PHX. There are lots of mistakes. Port of LA really has blue water also!
John McGaw

I don’t care what GE says, Schiphol in Amsterdam is the best in the world. Even a twelve hour layover due to bad scheduling can be fun at Schphol.
- mccrum
  
  Definitely. I mean, they put an art museum in there you can blow an hour in if you just take your time, it’s brilliant.
  
  Of course, if you have that amount of time, get on the train and go to town and sit in a cafe and make a day of it. I was able to do it on a 4 hour layover and it was great.
Daneel

I don’t much fancy flying out of London St. Pancras Airport…
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=775017841 Alan Cunningham

ATL represent!
http://www.facebook.com/Acmeaviator Brian Decker

Ok – the terrorists have totally won. If the first comments to a story about GE posting pictures of airports, pictures available all over the net and in library books (remember those?), is “What!! OMG..they might see the BIG BOARD!! (someone please get that)” we are done. Toast. Game Over.
- mccrum
  
  In my defense, mine was sarcasm with regard to how I have to go through all this proof to a paranoid security guard for when I take a photo of a train or near the fence at an airport.
  - http://www.facebook.com/Acmeaviator Brian Decker
    
    I completly understand and agree:)
LikesTurtles

Someday even flights from San Francisco to Oakland will be routed through Atlanta.