How we know

Guthrie–Edmond Regional has no control tower, so there is no official record of the flights that use it. We work takeoffs and landings out from the positions aircraft broadcast, which volunteers’ receivers pick up and share through adsb.lol. Most are seen rolling on the runway itself; the rest are last or first seen within a few hundred feet of it.

A touch-and-go is a landing followed straight away by a takeoff without stopping, usually flight training. Low practice approaches that come down to the runway and climb away are counted with them. The runway number says which way the plane was pointed: 34 is toward the north-northwest, 16 toward the south-southeast.

Which way the traffic comes. Downtown sits on runway 16’s centre line, a mile and a half north of it. An aircraft landing on 16 comes in over downtown; one taking off on 34 climbs out over it. The line saying which is happening now follows what the last few aircraft to land actually did; only when nobody has landed lately does it go by the wind, from the airport’s own weather station, and then it says the wind favours a runway, because that is a prediction. Heights over downtown are measured from downtown’s own ground, 983 feet above sea level by the U.S. Geological Survey’s elevation data — 85 feet lower than the runway, which is what heights above the ground elsewhere on these pages are measured from.

Aircraft that don’t broadcast their position aren’t counted, and a plane that lands and takes off several times in a day is counted each time. The tail number is the registration painted on the aircraft, broadcast with its position and listed in the FAA’s public registry; select one to see that aircraft’s other visits this week. Most military flights broadcast none.

Flight data from adsb.lol contributors, available under the Open Database License. This log is derived from it by the method described above.