Airports I’ve Been In

I created this page mainly as an excuse to play around with the Google Maps API and AJAX web development.

I generated an XML file describing the latitude/longitude position of every airport I’d ever been to (within memory) and then adapted the JavaScript examples in the API documentation so that they would parse the file and plot the locations on a map. The client browser, while loading the page, makes an asynchronous request for the XML data and then finishes loading the page. When the data eventually comes through, the client browser updates the page (i.e., the map and the table) with markers and table values created from the data.

You can pan the map around, zoom in and out, and switch between political, satellite, and hybrid views (like any Google map). Also, you can click on the markers for a quick summary of the airports they represent.

Thanks to World Airport Codes for the airport codes and Google Earth for the airport latitude/longitude locations.

Please note that this page does not work in Internet Explorer yet. Microsoft requires a very different syntax for manipulating XML in Internet Explorer, and I have not yet been able to get it to work right.

The Map

The Airports

The following is a table summarizing the airports I’ve been in:

Note that airports for which the airport code is starred represent airports that I have landed at and taken off from but not actually entered (i.e., there was a medical emergency in flight and we put down at an unscheduled airport so that it could be addressed before continuing on, or, more likely, the plane just made a scheduled stop en route to my destination.