Friday, December 14, 2007

So thats why...we have the accidents

It starts after I got an asignment from my office to do site visit in South Kalimantan. We open up a new office there so I had to set things up. The company did not put me in a hotel instead they made me to stay at the new office for 1 week. The location of the office is a little bit remote. There are practically nothing I can do in my spare time aside of my job setting several computers.
After I got back to Jakarta, I have to show how remote the office is to my fellow coworkers. So I try to find coordinate of the local airport (Syamsudin Noor airport), as my new office located near it. My first thought was to open the website of Angkasa Pura. Angkasa Pura is government own airport operator company in Indonesia. As I recalled this is the only airport operator in Indonesia responsible for all public domestic/international airports in Indonesia. I browse the site and find the page i was looking for about Syamsudin Noor airport here.


Screenshot. Noted the location coordinate.

I noted the location coordinate that is written on the page: 03.27S - 114.45E. Then I open Google Earth and try to find the airport. So here is what I got based on the coordinate information above:

Where the heck is the airport??!! Did I made a mistake reading the coordinate information? I did not! But where the heck is the airport? It should showed up clearly here, the runaway, the planes, the buildings, etc. Then I turn to the one of major source informations in the web today....Wikipedia. Search it and found it here. The coordinate from Wikipedia is: 03degree26'32"S 114degree45'45"E. Search it in Google Earth and this is what I got:

Now thats the airport! You can clearly look at the runaway. So the conclusion is the information about the location coordinate of the airport from the local authority-government own company is false. I didn't check for other airports in Indonesia (I have better work to do). But I wonder should someone decided to go to some airport or make an emergency landing and rely to the information given by the authority on their official website, where would they end up? I try to find the distance between the coordinate from the Angkasa Pura's website and fromWikipedia. It shows deviation distance around 40 kilometers and across the province capital city!

So the government says it safe for you to land your plane here in the middle of swamps and houses...


Instead of here...

where you have a perfectly safe and functional airport