Worldwide Soaring Turnpoint Exchange

Links for Additional Information about a Waypoint

A, D, F, L, M, m, O, Q, R, r, S, T, U, u, V, W, Z

• A links to information about an airport: courtesy of Paulo Santos' AirNav® [US airports only], courtesy of airports.dei® [DE airports only], or courtesy of Nav2000® [FR airports only, you will have to login for each 20 minute session].

• D links to driving instructions to get to the control point, courtesy of MapBlast®.   To get instructions to an arbitrary location, for example a retrieve, just select "D" for one of the control points, then select "Edit Trip", and under the "To" location enter the street address or select "Advanced Search" , and enter the decimal latitude [south = negative] and longitude [west = negative] of the desired location.

• F links to the RunwayFinder airport database and GoogleMap display courtesy of Dave Parsons. [ US sites only. ]

• L links to the Landings airport database courtesy of Günther Eichhorn.

• M links to a map of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of MSN MapPoint®

• m links to the METAR/TAF for the site, courtesy of Günther Eichhorn and Landings®.

• O links to a a satellite map of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of NASA's OnEarth

• Q links to a map of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of MapQuest®

• R links to a map of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of Rand McNally® [US waypoints only].

• r links to driving instructions from the home site to the control point, courtesy of Rand McNally® [US waypoints only].

• S links to a map of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of Street Map® [UK control points only], or to sectional map in the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of Aeroplanner® [US waypoints only], or to a map in the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of Kampsax GIS® [DK waypoints only]

• T links to an aerial or satellite photograph of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of TerraServer®, and when a photo is missing the USGS map may be provided. The photos are made up of several smaller tiles, and the image center may be off by as much as half a tile from the control point.

  The coordinates of the corners of the tiles are available under "Image Info" and - as Sam Fly points out - by zooming in to the highest magnification, and interpolating to the point of interest you can measure the coordinates a lot easier than by driving around with your Garmin. We have compared several runway threshholds surveyed by the FAA with the values interpolated from the Terraserver images, and one can easily do better than 100 foot accuracy. You can even see Sam on the runway at TSA about to take off. To measure the coordinates of a potential turnpoint, you can start here and enter the name or a rough latitude and longitude of the location that you would like to use, or click on the world map to home in on your location. The medium size image seems to work best as you zoom in. When you get to the highest resolution image select "image information" to get the coordinates of the corners of the tiles, and then guesstimate the coordinates of the controlpoint. You can practice on the Ennis, Texas runway 33 turnpoint whose coordinates should be 32°19'28", 96°39'43".

• U links to a USGS map of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of ESRI - ArcData Online®. To measure the coordinates of a point on the map, just click on the location and the map will be redrawn with the selected point at the center and its coordinates visible in the URL displayed on your browser. [US control points only]

• u links to URL containing information about the waypoint - usually a a picture of an off-field landing site.

• V [ US waypoints only. ] SkyVector sectional, runway information, and current weather.
     [ French, and contiguous countries', waypoints only. ] ViaMichelin maps for the locale, not the coordinates of the waypoint. The name matching may give multiple locations or even a completely wrong one, but the maps are very useful for retrieves.

• W links to information about an airport, courtesy of Shane Partain's World Aero Data.

• Z links to a USGS map of the vicinity of the control point, courtesy of TopoZone®. To measure the coordinates of a point on the map, just click on the location and the map will be redrawn with the selected point at the center and its coordinates visible in the URL displayed on your browser. The TopoZone is a pretty graphics-intensive application, and needs Netscape Navigator version 4.08 or higher, or Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.01 or above. [US control points only]

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Please contact John Leibacher with any suggestions concerning this material.