A request posted to the r/aviation community highlights a practical gap in publicly accessible aeronautical data archiving: historical airport diagrams for facilities that have either been replaced or significantly reconfigured are rarely preserved in any centralized, searchable repository. The poster is seeking pre-2011 diagrams of the original St. George, Utah airport (KSGU) — which was decommissioned when the replacement St. George Regional Airport opened in January 2011 — as well as pre-2018 diagrams of Santa Monica Municipal Airport (KSMO) from before the runway was physically shortened as part of a legal settlement between the City of Santa Monica and the FAA.
The two airports represent meaningfully different historical inflection points. The old St. George airport operated at a lower-elevation site with a significantly shorter runway than the current facility; its replacement was driven in large part by the need to accommodate larger regional jets and business aircraft serving the growing southern Utah market. Santa Monica's situation is arguably more significant from a regulatory and operational standpoint. Under a 2017 settlement agreement that resolved a long-running dispute between the city and the FAA over the airport's future, the runway was physically truncated — reducing the landing distance available from approximately 5,000 feet to roughly 3,500 feet. This change effectively excluded many business jets and heavier piston aircraft that had previously operated there routinely, fundamentally altering the airport's usable fleet mix overnight. Pilots who flew KSMO before and after that change experienced the operational impact directly; charts from the prior configuration document a meaningfully different airfield.
The underlying challenge the post surfaces is structural. The FAA publishes current and recent airport diagrams through its Aeronautical Information Services, but historical versions of those charts — particularly for airports that have closed or been substantially reconfigured — are not systematically archived in a publicly accessible format. Jeppesen and ForeFlight similarly update their databases incrementally and do not maintain a browsable historical archive. Once an airport closes or a chart cycle rolls over without a preserved snapshot, the only practical sources become individual pilots who retained paper charts or PDF subscriptions from the relevant period, flight schools, FBOs, or specialty aviation archives. For professional operators, this gap occasionally matters in legal, insurance, or accident investigation contexts where establishing the precise published configuration of an airfield at a specific point in time can be material.
The request connects to a broader, underappreciated issue in aviation data stewardship. As airports close, downsize, or transition — a trend accelerating in urban markets where land values create sustained pressure against general aviation facilities — the documentary record of what those airfields looked like operationally becomes increasingly difficult to reconstruct. Organizations such as the Ninety-Nines and various aviation history groups have made informal efforts to preserve historical charts, and the university aviation library system occasionally holds legacy Jeppesen binders. For Part 135 and Part 91K operators who conduct due diligence on unfamiliar destinations, and for training departments building historical case studies around airport-related incidents, the absence of a formal archival mechanism for superseded aeronautical charts represents a genuine, if low-profile, institutional gap in the aviation information ecosystem.