Bader Field Stakeholders Project
Background
Bader Field located in Atlantic City is a now closed airport that is owned by the City of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Bader Field was the first airfield to ever call itself an airport. During Atlantic City’s past, this airport was a convenient way for people to visit the resort as you could fly directly into the city limits as opposed to today having to fly into Atlantic City International Airport which is located 12.6 miles outside of town. As the airport aged and airplanes turned into jets, the airport was not able to service the larger aircraft of the day. Only small mostly personal aircraft were using the airport and it was eventually closed. As of 2019 it is not listed on any FAA Sectional Chart as an airport and its airspace is officially now G Class.
Today the property is city owned by the City of Atlantic City except for the Flyer’s Skate Zone complex. Located on the property is Fire Station 5 of the Atlantic City Fire Department and the Surf Stadium minor league baseball stadium. There are also municipal sewage and water lines that run through the property. Currently the property’s vast open spaces, both paved and grassland are used for a variety of things. Official, sanctioned automobile racing as well as triathlons use the property throughout the year. Also, festivals and celebrations make use of the property and events such as the Sea Food Fest and unveiling of the new 2020 C8 Chevrolet Corvette have been held here.
This being a city asset there is a lot of activity on the site. In an effort to provide stakeholders valuable information on the site, sUAS (Drone) mapping has been used to give an up to date, high resolution ortho-mosaic, dense point cloud and 3D Mesh of the property. Previously if Shapefiles were needed with the vectorization of points, polylines and polygons, the map in the form of a Tiff file would be exported to other software. At this time, the generous free trial of Pix4D is being evaluated to compare the previous workflow with a workflow using just Pix4D.
Well over 100 objects were vectorized as points, polylines and polygons. These items are important parts of the property and when generated into Shapefiles, this information could be shared and evaluated easily. These files now contain location, full length and area measurements of the following:
- ACFD Fire Station
- Building Footprint
- Parking Lot
- Access Roads
- Roof Square footage
- Flyer’s Skate Zone
- Property Outline
- Parking Lot
- Building Footprint
- Surf Stadium
- Stadium Footprint
- Baseball Field
- Grass Areas
- Surface Roads
- Parking Lots
- Sloped and Low Sloped Roofing Square footage
- Bader Field
- Runways
- Access Roads
- Construction Area for New Bulkhead
- Grassy Areas
- Sewage Repair Project
- Exposed Sewage Pipe Installed
- Sewage Pipe Stockpile
- Waste Containers
- Storage Containers
- Stockpiles
- Location of Heavy Machinery
- Snow/Debris Fencing
- Metal Decking Road
- Other Information
- Peter Egnor Bridge Personnel Parking Area
- Bader Field Fencing facing North Albany Avenue
- Light Posts (Laying on Ground for Disposal)
- Large Stadium Lighting (Laying on Ground for Disposal)
- Bulkheads
- Modular Wall Systems
This valuable information will now be available to all stakeholders in the form of easily shared Shapefiles. Among the various benefits are:
- Event Planning
- Landscaping Planning
- Roof Replacement Estimates
- Paving of Dirt Road Estimates
- Stockpile Removal Estimates
- Progress Report on the Sewage Pipeline Repair
- Progress Report on the Bulkhead Installation
- Location of Waste
Overall, this project has turned out to be a major success. Previously, information of this type (On-demand, high resolution, multi-format) would have not been achievable without the hiring of a surveyor and/or a GIS specialist. Using low cost sUAS piloted in house with state-of-the-art photogrammetry and mapping software has proven itself as fast, sustainable as well as rewarding.
Using Pix4D Survey as the final step in producing the deliverables in the form of Shapefiles helped to speed up the project to a high degree. Without the use of Pix4D Survey, other software would have been used adding to the time. Other GIS software can have a very large learning curve that can only be overcome by long usage experience, training or formal education. Pix4D Survey was a very easy to use software and after reading the directions and being familiar with other Pix4D products, the vectorization of the dense point cloud began immediately and was a straightforward process. An estimate on the amount of time saved on this project is around 50% for the vectorization process. Another bonus is that only one family of products was used. Pix4D Capture was used to collect the images using a Parrot Anafi sUAS. Pix4D Cloud was used to process the images into the ortho-mosaic, dense point cloud and 3D Mesh. Finally, Pix4D Survey was used to vectorize points, polylines and polygons into actionable deliverables in the form of Shapefiles for fast export and sharing. A final note is that Pix4D Survey allowed me to vectorize the dense point cloud as to using the orthomosaic. This allowed me to not only vectorize the base of a building, but also the roof, and this vectorization allowed for me to see angles of the roofs.
Timeline:
Image Acquisition Flight – 3.5 hours
Processing – 10 hours (Total Time, including waiting time in queue)
Vectorization – 2 Hours (Prediction of 4 hours using other software)
sAUS – Parrot Anafi
200’ AGL Grid Pattern Nadir
GSD – 1.82 cm
2307 Images
