Monthly Archives: March 2013

Left spar mostly riveted

Finally finished a ridiculous amount of solid riveting and have a mostly-rived left spar to make airplane sounds with.

I haven’t yet seen anyone simulate using their spar as a gun, so here goes…

Solid riveting left spar

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Flight to every public airport in Alabama

I like to think of all the places I’m going to fly my Sonex once it is completed.  One idea I keep considering is to fly to every public airport in Alabama.  I thought it would be interesting to investigate the shortest possible route.

I obtained an XML file containing all 89 public airports and their latitude/longitude coordinates using the GPX Aviation Waypoint Generator.  I would have preferred to get this data directly from the FAA, but couldn’t quickly find it on their website (plus I already use this GPX data on my Stratomaster Enigma flight instrument).

I downloaded and compiled the Linux version of Concorde TSP (this also required downloading the QSopt linear programming solver library and header file).  Concorde can read from TSPLIB formatted input files which basically consist of a header and a list of points with coordinates.  You can specify “GEO” formatted data in the input file and should be able to provide lat/lon coordinates, but the result wasn’t good.  Rather than trace this down, I converted all the lat/lon coordinates into X,Y coordinates in meters relative to Madison County Executive Airport (using GeographicLib).

The total trip length is 1830 miles and could be done in 14.5 hours at an average speed of 125mph (this is probably very optimistic if a landing is performed at each airport).  Stopping overnight at KEDN would allow the trip to be broken into 763 and 1067 mile legs.

This idea was at least partially inspired by Ron Schreck’s North Carolina flight where he touched down at all 109 public airports in North Carolina in one day.

Here are the airport codes of each airport on the trip:

KMDQ 3M5 4A6 7A6 4A9 C22 KPYP KGAD 20A 8A0 8A1 3A1 5M0 2A8 3M2 KJFX KBHM KEKY KEET 02A KALX KSCD KPLR KASN KANB 26A 7A5 7A3 KAUO 06A 41A 07A 11A KEUF 0J0 0J6 KDHN 71J KEDN 33J 1A4 0J4 79J 14J KTOI 04A KPRN 67A KMGM 08A 1A9 KSEM 61A KMVC KGZH 12J 0R1 1R8 KBFM KCQF 5R4 KJKA 4R9 5R7 2R5 KMOB 15A 5R1 4R3 3A0 09A KDYA 7A0 A08 0A8 KTCL KAIV 3M8 M95 M55 KHAB 1M4 M22 KMSL 9A4 KDCU KHSV 1M3 M38 KMDQ