While waiting for my day job to begin I’ve found a new project / time sponge. Most of my flight logs (circa 1975-1988) are pen and ink ledger books. So, now is a good time to update the media and bring the old archives into the new millennium. Using mouse, keyboard, and Excel spreadsheet to transpose the data items, line for line, is not only tedious, but some of the airports flown have been renamed, moved, closed and lost to residential expansion. I have found several online resources which help me reconstruct these old flights. Some private landing fields, crop duster strips or ranches are obscure and difficult to pinpoint. One such challenge was Las Cruces and its private Club de Caza y Pesca de Baja California resort. All of these places seemed matter of fact in my mind 25 years ago and were merely scribbled, short hand, into these old books. Today, however, some locations are lost to memory and the documentation limited. Diener and Peck Ranches, Jubil and Schwartz Farms — where did they go?
Once found, I post their geo-coordinates, importing all into a database on my server. Using a few lines of PHP, and the Google Maps API, dynamic code displays a nifty push-pin map. It’s a work in progress and so far this map project displays my first decade of flying. View the output [ here ].
