Old Airports

January 8th, 2020
maps, transit
One thing I enjoy about aerial imagery is that you can see traces of how cities used to be. Tracing the spaces left behind by old train lines is a lot of fun, but recently I've been looking at some airports:

Old Saint-Pierre Airport (link), now with housing:

Old Jijiga Airport (link), also with housing, mostly recognizable as a piece of the street grid that doesn't match:

Old Guangzhou Airport (link), barely visible:

Old Quito Airport (link), now a large park and very visible. I think this the airport we used when we visited Ecuador in 2012:

Old Rio Branco Airport (link) is now a road:

Old Austin Airport (link) is very hard to recognize. All the ones above were single-runway, but Mueller airport had two large runways at an angle. Single-runway ones stand out a lot more, but this is still visible as a section of the city that doesn't really fit:

Old Lima Airport (link) closed sixty years ago and has been completely built over. But the runways survive as a pair of crossing roads:

There's a list on Wikipedia but my favorites are ones where I've been looking at an aerial photo and thought "there has to have been an airport there!"

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

AI incompetence often comes from misalignment

Sometimes I see people say “I’m not worried about AI risk because AIs are really bad at things.” I think this is a misunderstanding.

via Thing of Things April 27, 2026

You should try contra dancing

a story of middle school Ben • a not-very-illuminating description of the mechanics • flow, joy, and community • the antidote to the rest of life • how to try contra

via benkuhn.net April 24, 2026

On AI writing in 2026

I use AI to write a little bit: I ask it for high level feedback on blog post drafts, make mechanical edits, and sometimes use it to brainstorm options for wording at a paragraph level. It’s unusual that I accept its wording or changes without modificatio…

via Home April 16, 2026

more     (via openring)