KRAL/RAL - Riverside Municipal Airport

Riverside, United States

Riverside Municipal Airport (Riverside Arlington Airport, decades ago) (IATA: RAL, ICAO: KRAL, FAA LID: RAL), is four miles (6 km) southwest of downtown Riverside, the county seat of Riverside County, California, United States.Scheduled flights to Laughlin/Bullhead International Airport (Arizona) on Western Express Air ended when that airline ceased operations at the end of May 2007.Runway 9/27 was paved about 1956 and Bonanza Air Lines appeared soon after; until 1969 it and successor Air West flew DC-3s and Fairchild F-27s to LAX, Las Vegas, Palm Springs and beyond. Golden West Airlines served Riverside in the 1970s with nonstop and direct de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters to LAX. Riverside Municipal Airport has been home to Civil Air Patrol Squadron 5 since 2005. "FedEx Express donated a Boeing 727-200F to California Baptist University for its new aviation science program.

(Airport Infos by Wikipedia)

Open current view/airport in an external service:

Google Maps
OurAirports.com

Random Airports

This app shows satellite views of random airports. Its aim is to introduce you to the variety of airport structures embedded into the landscape.

Usage

Click on the satellite image or on the button in the control panel to advance to another randomly selected airport.
Click on the button in the control panel to start auto play mode (every 30 seconds a random airport is loaded); Click on the button to stop the auto play mode.
Click on the button in the control panel to search for a specific airport by ICAO code, IATA code, airport name, or location name.
Click on the button in the control panel to show additional information about the current airport and to open the current view in a variety of external services (e.g. Google Maps).
Click on the button in the control panel to toggle fullscreen mode.
Unlike other mapping websites, it is not possible to change the view by panning it around with the mouse or to change the zoom factor.

Technologies and Data Sources

This app is based on the Google Maps API, which on the one hand provides a powerful programming interface for web-based mapping applications, and on the other hand opens access to high quality satellite imagery for places all over the world.

The backend is realized in Python with the help of the excellent Flask micro framework.

The locations of airports have been imported from the public domain data provided by the aviation enthusiasts at OurAirports.com. The app displays randomly selected airports of the categories 'large_airport','medium_airport' and 'small_airport' for which runway coordinates are available.

Furthermore, the user interface incorporates icons from Font Awesome and fonts from Google Fonts.

Author

This is brought to you by me, Florian Pigorsch. Feel free to contact me via mail. The source code of this app can be found at Github.

Backlinks

Random Airports has been featured on several websites including

the AvGeek Weekly Newsletter on 2015/01/16,
the Maps Mania blog on 2015/01/03

Some Examples

Here's a list of 10 random airports:

Random Airports

This app shows satellite views of random airports. Its aim is to introduce you to the variety of airport structures embedded into the landscape.

Click on the satellite image or on to advance to another randomly selected airport.
Click on start 'auto play' mode (every 30 seconds a random airport is loaded).
Click on to search for a specific airport.
Click on to show infos about the current airport.
Click on to toggle fullscreen mode.

Search for airports

You can search for ICAO-codes (4-letter airport codes, e.g. 'KSFO'), IATA-codes (3-letter airport codes, e.g. 'SFO'), airport and location names (e.g. 'San Francisco').
Search queries containing multiple words and/or non-alphanumeric characters may be problematic - try to keep your query simple (e.g. prefer 'Helsinki' to 'Helsinki Airport')!

Here's a list of 10 randomly selected airports: