Best Practices for Mission Applications

FAA Abandoned Beacon Discovery

—Robert Hallett, USDOT / Volpe

The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Cambridge Massachusetts was tasked by the FAA to develop a method of locating obsolete beacon facilities across the U.S. These beacons became obsolete in the 1950s and the only records of their locations were on historic airway sectional maps. In order to produce maps that would assist in physically locating the beacons, the Volpe Center and FAA digitized and georeferenced the beacon locations from the airway sectional maps into GIS. ESRI ArcView 9 along with publicly available data such as street maps, topographic maps, NGS Benchmark GIS data, local property plans, and satellite imagery was used to map the beacons and also assist in identifying property owners.