You’d asked me to contribute my findings that I’d posted here:
The thing is, most of what I’m seeing isn’t that the airstrip/airport is simply non-existent in the real world and needs to be deleted, it’s more an issue of the way the development of the sim was constructed that many of the private or defunct airstrips are assigned ICAO-esque names.
My posts and my concerns, thus far, are focused on the USA and, specifically, California.
My preliminary research has revealed that an individual with a private airfield would (could? should?) register with the FAA and would be able to be assigned a Location Identifier (LID).
What is confusing, to me, is why many of these private/defunct airstrips (perhaps, that don’t have an official LID) are given K-based ICAO codes.
There are many examples in California alone:
- KSAM
- KBUO
- KTAB
- KTAA
- KLOS
- etc.
As an example, this is what “KLOS” looks like zoomed in on one end. This is a closed, unmaintained airstrip:
And this is what the sim is calling KBUO “Buttonwillow Airport”, when in reality that looks like a private airstrip for, what looks like, a crop duster (when zoomed in via a maps app) parked over by the hangar to the west:
This is the real Buttonwillow Airport known as L62 south of the aforementioned private strip:
Rather than using an unofficial unsanctioned ICAO designator for these unidentified airstrips, it would have made more sense to have a non-official, sim-specific identifier code that represented unregistered private or defunct airstrips.
For me, I don’t want these deleted, but I’d rather they be designated something else that classified them as closed, private, defunct (aka dilapidated) rather than assigning them an ICAO-esque name as if they were a proper airport.