Historic Airfield in Fort Collins, CO

​

Mapping an airfield as it exists today—and preserving a moment in its history.

​

Airfields are never quite as permanent as they appear. Runways change. Buildings come and go. Pavement ages. Operations evolve. Even the landscape surrounding them changes over time.

​

Christman Airfield presented an opportunity to document one of those moments in time while also demonstrating what detailed aerial mapping can provide to an airport. THE FLYING LIZARD conducted a comprehensive mapping mission of the airfield, capturing thousands of high-resolution aerial images that could be reconstructed into a detailed two- and three-dimensional record of the property.

​

The objective was technical, but there was something else behind the mission as well. We weren't simply creating a map of Christman Airfield. We were capturing the airfield as it exists today, knowing that someday this particular version of it will no longer exist.

​

THE MISSION

Located just northwest of Fort Collins, Colorado, Christman Airfield has been part of the region's aviation landscape for decades. Our mission was to create a detailed aerial record of the airfield using systematic, high-resolution image acquisition.

​

Flying the DJI Matrice 4E, THE FLYING LIZARD captured the property using a planned mapping mission designed to provide the overlapping image geometry needed for both two-dimensional mapping and three-dimensional reconstruction. The mission extended beyond the runway itself to capture taxiways, buildings, aircraft areas, surrounding terrain and the relationships between those features across the airfield.

​

Thousands of individual photographs were collected during the mission. Each photograph captured only a small portion of the property, but when processed together through photogrammetry, those images became one connected representation of the entire airfield.

​

FROM THE AIRFIELD TO THE MODEL

A conventional aerial photograph can provide an excellent perspective of an airport, but it still represents a single view from a single position. A mapping dataset provides something different.

 

The imagery collected over Christman Airfield was used to create a high-resolution orthomosaic, providing a continuous overhead view of the property, as well as a detailed three-dimensional model that allows the airfield to be examined from perspectives that were never actually photographed by a camera.

​

That ability to move through the model changes the way a site can be understood. The runway can be viewed in relation to surrounding buildings. Areas that appear disconnected from the ground become part of the same visual environment. Different perspectives can be created for meetings, planning discussions or documentation without returning an aircraft to the sky.

​

Rather than a collection of aerial photographs, the result becomes a digital representation of a real place at a specific point in time.

​

WHY THAT MATTERS

Airports rarely change everywhere at once. A section of pavement is repaired. A building changes. A staging area appears. Vegetation grows. Construction begins somewhere along the field. Operational areas gradually evolve.

​

Individually, those changes can seem insignificant. Over time, however, they create a different airport.

​

A detailed aerial baseline gives airport teams a shared visual reference for what existed at a particular moment. That record can support planning discussions, construction coordination, facility documentation and project meetings while helping people who may not regularly be on the airfield understand conditions from the same visual reference.

​

Instead of relying entirely on descriptions, individual photographs or someone's memory of what existed, the airfield itself becomes something the team can return to and examine.

​

A MOMENT IN TIME

There is another side to the Christman Airfield mission that has little to do with photogrammetry.

Someday, this dataset will be old.

​

Aircraft will come and go. Buildings may change. Pavement will be repaired or replaced. The surrounding landscape will continue to evolve. What we captured during this mission will gradually stop representing the current condition of Christman Airfield.

​

And that's precisely when it begins to become something else.

​

A historical record.

​

The same imagery that provides useful information today will eventually show what the airfield looked like years earlier—not through a handful of photographs taken from selected locations, but through a detailed aerial record encompassing the entire property.

​

THE BOTTOM LINE

Aerial mapping is often discussed in terms of resolution, accuracy, measurements and models, and those capabilities are important. But the Christman Airfield mission demonstrates something broader.

​

A detailed aerial dataset can help people understand a place as it exists today while simultaneously preserving that place for tomorrow.

​

For Christman Airfield, that meant creating a detailed map and three-dimensional model that can be explored, examined and shared today.

​

Years from now, those same images will tell another story.

​

They'll show exactly what Christman Airfield looked like at this moment in its history.

​

Mission Data Snapshot

Date of Flight: July 2026

Location: Fort Collins, Colorado

Conditions: Partly cloudy skies

Platform: DJI Matrice 4E

Flight Time: 58 minutes, 37 seconds

Area Covered: 191.1 acres

Flight Altitude: 300 feet AGL

Ground Sampling Distance (GSD): 3.47 cm/pixel

Images Captured: 4,836

Technical Insight: High-overlap aerial acquisition across the 191-acre airfield produced a unified dataset capable of supporting both high-resolution orthomosaic generation and detailed 3D reconstruction from the same mission.