Fly-in Geocaches

December 10, 2004

Idea: the geocaching.com site should provide an option for listing geocaches within reasonable walking distance of an airport. This is for pilots who want to fly in, park the plane, go find a geocache, then get back in the plane and fly off. They don't want to rent a car, they don't want to take a taxi, and they don't want to bum a ride from a muggle.

A cursory look indicates that some geocachers have already picked up on this idea. The small General Aviation airport near me already has a geocache right where I was thinking about putting one! The pilot wouldn't even need to shut off the engine, he could just leave it idling!

But it's not all that clear on the web page that this geocache is so convenient for pilots. If the pilot goes to the effort of bumping the coords of the airports against the list of geocaches, maybe he could find the ones near an airport for himself. But, ideally, the geocaching.com site should do it for him.

The lo-tech method would simply be to have the owner of the cache check a box indicating the cache is within easy walking distance of an airport. A higher-tech method would be to have the system automatically check the coords of airports (I'll bet there's a list somewhere) and filter out any geocaches farther than a half mile or so. That latter method has the problem that the system wouldn't know if there's a fence in the way or something, while the cache owner could easily evaluate the access.

22k · December 10, 2004

I'd rather have you focused on flying. :lol:

There are security/logistical concerns about how close you can place a cache to an airport. I'm not sure if 'walking distance' is always feasible. Certainly not enough to have gc.com make them special caches.

3.9k · December 10, 2004

How is a pilot going to an airport different than an engineer going to stay in a hotel in a different city, or a woman going to stay with her sister in a different state? There's already a way for people to put in a set of coordinates and find all the caches within X number of miles.

Whenever I go out of town I always run a pocket query for the caches around my hotel. That way I find out if I have any caches to walk to if I don't have access to a rental car, or to drive to if I do have a car. It's easy, and also allows you to filter out any specific kinds of caches you don't like (virtual, micro, etc).

8.9k · December 10, 2004

I also kow for a fact that pilots have ready access to the coordinates of almost every airport. Shouldn't be too tough to create a PQ and just not have it e-mail the results. Just set the center coordinates on the airport and look for all the caches within 2 miles of your landing strip. :lol:

December 10, 2004

Another idea - we just recently flew out to Virginia, and had a layover in Atlanta, about 3 hours or so. After having played with the GPS on the plane (and getting a max speed of 638 mph and max altitude of 38,000 ft), it would have been nice to grab a cache or two that was just outside of the airport. Caches near airports needn't be just for pilots, but those of us who are carrying travel bugs or just want to grab a cache while passing through (think of it as a fly-layover-and-grab instead of a drive-up-and-grab :lol: )

~Jared

3.9k · December 10, 2004

Another idea - we just recently flew out to Virginia, and had a layover in Atlanta, about 3 hours or so.

At the Atlanta Airport there is a virtual cache right outside the doors that you used to be able to grab pretty easily while you were travelling through. Unfortunately it's been temporarily disabled due to some construction, but I'd love to see it put back when the construction is complete.

I also travel a lot and always check to see if there are caches (virtual or otherwise) near airports that I'll be in. It's always fun when I realize there's one within walking distance.

There is also a Travel Bug Hotel pretty close to the atlanta airport. With three hours to spare you easily could have gone there in a taxi for just a few dollars.

20.7k · December 12, 2004

There's an awesome tb hotel near LAX. Ooops, they put an end to this terrorist hangout. I'm glad my bugs got out before it was removed. :blink:

2.4k · December 12, 2004

I think it's a good idea. Certainly pilots (and anyone else) has access to the coordinates for all the airports, but it's just not feasible to check for caches around 10,000 airports. When you're just going out for a hundred-dollar hamburger, with no particular place to go except to do some flying, it would be very convenient to be able to find caches at airports. And not all airports have security problems. There are thousands of small airports around, most with little or no security - you can just walk onto or across them, because they aren't that big. They're mostly owned by a municipal agency, so they're public property. We aren't talking about Atlanta here, folks, but Podunk Municipal. Many people have no idea how many airports there are around. The FAA listing runs to about 56MB in a text file.

5.3k · December 12, 2004

The less you rely on site changes and the more readily you take matters into your own hand, the happier you'll be. Use pocket queries to suck up the caches for the areas you may be in. In the U.S., at least, lists of airports are easy to get:

http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnis/web_quer..._web_query_form

Use the 'points' suboption to GPSBabel's arc filter or another program of your choosing to limit it to just the ones you're interested in. If you're realistic about what you choose (if you're doing it on foot, a 5/5 multi probably isn't an option) overspraying and then locally filtering probably isn't a terrible option.

[ edit: include below ]

Actually, that's pretty darned easy. As I happened to have the required pieces laying around, I gave it a shot for my area.

Since I had the master list of GNIS items, I extracted just the 169 airports:

awk -F'|' '$4 == "airport" {print $10, $11}' TN* > /tmp/aplist

(some folks will find it easier to download only the list with airports and then use some horribly bloated package like excel or word to extract only the 10'th and 11'th fields, but I already had the big file and my awk command ran in a fraction of the time it takes Excel to load...)

gpsbabel -i gpx -f Myhomearea -x arc,distance=1m,points,file=/tmp/aplist -o gpx -F /tmp/nearap.gpx

Poof. My list of 1,436 caches is now reduced to the 79 that are one mile or less from an airport. Spot-checking them on the map via the "nearby places" shows it's right.

Edited December 12, 2004 by robertlipe

9.2k · December 12, 2004

Yeah, a cache near an airport is a great idea!

December 12, 2004

FYI. There's a cache near Logan Airport.

December 12, 2004

A TB hotel near an airport would be nice not only for the pilot but also the passengers

December 12, 2004

NightPilot and a couple of others picked up on what I was getting at, but I'm afraid others misunderstood. I wasn't suggesting a list of caches near LAX and ATL for the benefit of the handful of geocachers who also happen to be airline pilots. What I was suggesting is a list of caches near General Aviation airports, the little grass or asphalt strips surrounded with Cessnas, for the benefit of those private pilots who have to log umpteen hours of flying time every 90 days to maintain their licenses anyway! All they need is an excuse to go to one particular airport or another, or maybe a circuit of several, to log a coupla hours of stick time, a couple of landings, and a couple of geocache finds, all in the same afternoon!

Yeah, I suppose you could enter the coords of the airport in question and tell geocaching.com to list everything within a mile or two, but there are ZILLIONS of these little airports. There are so many that the GA pilot can usually choose among dozens when he's out for a nice day of flyin' around.

And, no, there are no security concerns. There is a GA airport near me with an existing cache only perhaps 200 yards from the runway, but it's well hidden in the woods near a picnic area. If someone planted a bomb there, they might kill a squirrel or two.

robertlipe: Wow! I didn't understand any of that, but it sure sounds like this idea wouldn't be difficult to implement from a software standpoint! OTOH, perhaps there's a way to implement the idea via a SEPARATE web site, someplace that pilots can visit to make a quick search for geocaches near airports in a particular area.

Hey, it's just an idea. If it's too much hassle, forget about it. But I think it'd be intriguing enough to convince some pilots to take up geocaching. And I bet it'd help some TB's log some serious miles!

1.2k · December 12, 2004

I have a couple of suggestions!

1. Begin the cache name with the letter combination for the airport. For example have we done that for our two caches at the GOT airport (Goteborg-Landvetter Airport, Sweden).

2. Have a list somewhere of travel bug hotels.

3. Have a list somewhere over caches very close to airports (walking distance).

But NO, no new cache types please...

December 13, 2004

Interesting idea, but could this really happen. With the exception of very small regional airports, my experience is that it would be a mile walk or more from the terminal to any place that is not on the grounds of the airport. You cannot hide caches on airport property for security reasons, so I wonder if this is feasible. I have wondered the same thing because I travel quite a lot, but then realized that most airports have huge grounds -- at least a short cab ride to a cache.

1.2k · December 13, 2004

You cannot hide caches on airport property for security reasons, so I wonder if this is feasible. I have wondered the same thing because I travel quite a lot, but then realized that most airports have huge grounds -- at least a short cab ride to a cache.

Can't you!? :unsure:

Not the whole world is like USA.

December 13, 2004

You cannot hide caches on airport property for security reasons, so I wonder if this is feasible. I have wondered the same thing because I travel quite a lot, but then realized that most airports have huge grounds -- at least a short cab ride to a cache.

Can't you!?

Not the whole world is like USA.

You are quite correct -- sorry for the stupid assumption that all nations have the same issues. OK, so my comment applies to US airports only.

So let's see -- last year I was in Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. None of these had caches on airport grounds. Are they allowed? How about Sweden -- do you have airport caches? Including ammo cans?

1.2k · December 13, 2004

You cannot hide caches on airport property for security reasons, so I wonder if this is feasible. I have wondered the same thing because I travel quite a lot, but then realized that most airports have huge grounds -- at least a short cab ride to a cache.

Can't you!?

Not the whole world is like USA.

You are quite correct -- sorry for the stupid assumption that all nations have the same issues. OK, so my comment applies to US airports only.

So let's see -- last year I was in Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. None of these had caches on airport grounds. Are they allowed? How about Sweden -- do you have airport caches? Including ammo cans?

Ammo cans.. Haven't seen them as caches in Sweden... But we have caches at airports (or very close to airports) in Sweden, Denmark, Norway etc... We normally use food containers like Rubbermaid. I have only been geocaching in these countries so I don't know about the rest of world...

Fly-in Geocaches

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