Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

partow.net

87 pointsArashPartow42 comments

I can't stress just how important (and how hard) it is to get a great source of data for airports, so kudos on the work! When building All the Flight Deals (https://alltheflightdeals.com) and BookWithMatrix (https://bookwithmatrix.com), airport data was essential.

It seems like your database covers the basics! However, timezone data and airport type/size were pretty important information for us, so we ended up getting these from:

- OpenFlights [1]: this dataset was great since it had timezone too, which was really helpful for calculating flight lengths, etc.

- OurAirports [2]: no timezone here, but the "type" and "scheduled_service" columns in this dataset are essential. "Type" lets you distinguish between small/medium/large airports, and "scheduled_service" lets you easily filter out airports without real flights (which you often might not care about).

- IATA tzmap [3]: this was used for filling in timezone data and is derived from the Geonames database.

- Random other GitHub Gist [4]: I have no idea where this data comes from, but it was surprisingly complete and has a few golden nuggets like "num_flights" and "runway_length" in addition to "timezone". The presence of a "woeid" suggests Yahoo-related origins, but it's hard to be sure.

Long story short, it'd be AWESOME to have one complete, updated database with all this data in one place, but part of the struggle is definitely having more data than just longitude/latitude.

[1] https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/

[2] http://ourairports.com/data/

[3] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hroptatyr/dateutils/tzmaps...; http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/

[4] https://gist.github.com/tdreyno/4278655

I’d love someone to finish my tool that would semi-randomly query Matrix and find “interesting” business class flights, where interesting is a ratio between price and either distance or tier points / eqm / airmiles earned.

Is the source available?

I found out about http://www.flightconnections.com/ a couple of weeks ago when a friend linked it to me. It looks like it has fairly exhaustive data on airports including all the airports they connect to, which the OP doesn't have. However, it is lacking on everything else :)

Where do these guys get their data from?

shrugs I'm as confused as you are!

Don’t forget that time zone boundaries often change, so if you are going to store a “time zone” field, make sure you regularly update them.

You are right about the lack of availability of complete airport data. This is true for many things aviation related, including airspace boundaries, navigation aids, etc. Basically anything you would find on a pilot’s chart. The USA is a wonderful exception as they publish a great deal of info digitally and for free, but this is not true for most other countries. Many countries cartographic offices (or their private contractors) even claim copyright over basic facts like “airport ABC is at location X” and “navaid DEF transmits on frequency 123”. It’s crazy that information that potentially could save lives are locked up behind rent extracting corporations and intellectual property laws.

> Don’t forget that time zone boundaries often change

I always thought time zones boundaries were static... TIL

Actual time zone boundaries have on average 2-3 changes a year. Sudan recently hopped back an hour for example, a separatist state in eastern Ukraine switched to Moscow time and Russia changed the time zones of a bunch of cities last year.

What does happen more often is people screwing around with Daylight savings. Each year probably a dozen countries decide to change how they're going to do daylight savings, either by canceling or reintroducing it or moving the date when the changeover happens. And the you get some real oddities like Morocco (I think it was) a few years ago the decided to temporarily suspend daylights saving during Ramadan (what do you mean your software cannot handle having an arbitrary number of dates for the start and end of daylight saving each year)

World "timezone" boundaries, in terms of which regions of the world adhere to what offset, sometimes move around. This is what most people think of when talking about timezones, in that they're talking about regions of the world in aggregate by offset: e.g. every place that's UTC+03:00. Seasonal shifts like Daylight Saving complicate this blanket definition further.

The IANA Timezone Database flips the definition to be local instead of global, and attempts to define a timezone as a region in which all clocks are supposed to have agreed since the 1970 Unix Epoch [1]. Furthermore, since governments are the most frequent source of official timekeeping changes, they attempt to prevent zones from crossing international boundaries.

Typically, IANA timezones (whose geographical extent is documented in shapefiles) don't change shape, or change shape only with national borders themselves. When a country decides to change clocks only in a portion of its territory -- "splitting" an existing IANA zone -- a new zone is created for the area that does not include the city after which the zone is named. Some recent examples are the island of Cyprus [2] and a new timezone surrounding Tomsk [3] in Russia.

[1] https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html [2] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-October/024399.html [3] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2016-April/000038...

Yeah, the US and Canada are fantastic exceptions to the normal rule of making aeronautical information impossible to find and use. It really sucks that GA is so much more rare outside of North America. For all the bitching we do about the FAA, they're a generally pretty good organization that actually wants people to fly. The vibe I get from most other countries' aviation authority is that they just don't want us up there and that we're a pest or threat. They make it expensive and regulate it into the ground, or worse, ban GA altogether. In the US, airspace is, for the most part, open or easy to get clearance to (barring the presidential TFR and DC ADIZ nonsense), getting a license is more or less easily attainable, and buying or renting an aircraft is super easy. This isn't really the case anywhere else in the world.

Alltheflightdeals looked great, but I'm having trouble creating a subscription.

Are you getting hugged to death by HN right now?

The page from the confirmation email link takes very long to load and then results in an 'unexpected error'. When I try to create a new subscription, I'm getting a request for confirmation to 'update my settings', so the subscription seems to be saved.

When I look at the page which should show my subscribed destinations, I'm getting all kinds of flights from locations I haven't signed up for. Trying to edit my subscription from that page tells me that my 'email doesn't currently seem to be subscribed'.

A usability issue (not sure if it's related to the suspected current performance issues) is that after creating an email subscription, the overlay doesn't close and cannot be manually closed, so that I have to reload the page and don't see that you sent me a request for confirmation.

Good catch here on the confirmation email link issue! I just fixed that. I've noticed for creating an email subscription, it takes a while for the overlay to close; did it never close for you? I wasn't able to reproduce this, so let me know if you have more details.

It's the goal of the OpenStreetMap project to basically have all o fhtat.

All the Flight Deals looks to be a pretty neat site.

Are the deals usually pretty short lived? For example, is it possible there is only one seat at the price?

This is a small sample of airports; would be interesting to know how they were selected.

> airports big and small from all around the world

Well, presumably mostly big.

The CIA Facebook shows 13500 airports for the USA alone, and 6 countries with more than 1000 [0]. So, when you count smaller airports (potentially untowered, or unpaved runways), there is way more than what's listed here.

Most countries (ICAO members) maintain an AIP (Aeronautical Information Publication, [1]) which lists the bigger airports in a country (and definitely the international ones with immigration and customs facilities) in part AD (aerodromes) and is often readily downloadable from the pertinent national civil aviation authority [2].

However, information on smaller airfields is often quite hard to come by.

I've flown small airplanes around in southern Africa and Thailand, and relied on websites, books, and aviation clubs to find coordinates for airfields. See eg. the Airfields Directory of Southern Africa [3] or Tom Claytor's list at the bottom of the Thai Flying Club website [4].

[0] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Information_Publi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civil_aviation_authori...

[3] http://www.cometaviationsupplies.co.za/index.php?route=produ...

[4] http://www.thaiflyingclub.com

EDIT: typos, clarity

Is there a clear definition between airfield and airport? Or rather, is there a distinction between places you can land a plane vs places an individual can buy a ticket to fly with an airline? I imagine this line gets blurred in certain countries more so than others, perhaps that's what the posted dataset is more geared towards?

Had some time today so put together a .Net client for this data [0][1] in case anyone is interested.

[0]: https://github.com/shrayasr/GlobalAirports.Net [1]: https://www.nuget.org/packages/GlobalAirports.Net

OpenFlights also has great data[0] here - and not just for airports, but also train stations, airline/carrier codes, and routes (i.e. origin/destination pairs with a carrier).

No sign of schedules from them yet, but there's been a request-for-interest on the site regarding those for a few years now.

[0] - https://openflights.org/data.html

OpenFlights maintainer here. Thanks for the kudos, although our airport data is primarily from OurAirports.com these days.

Re: schedules, I've finally got a good lead on a way to obtain data without relying on the OAG/Innovata duopoly. Stay tuned.

I am super interested in that final point of yours. Any more details you can share?

Also, I owe you a beer in real life for enabling my app to exist.

Sorry, not at this stage, but please tell me more about your use case & sign up to be notified:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe7wl5eKTraibp0l6cS...

And OpenFlights accepts donations ;)

Great stuff! I was working on a project where we needed a database of all airports around the world. I used http://ourairports.com/data/ IIRC. Out of curiosity, what's different in your project? Also, would be good to add the type of airport (e.g. airfield, airport, etc.).

Best of luck!

Came here to post this: OurAirports seems to be much more comprehensive, does GADB have any advantage over this? Also, where is GADB's data sources from?

Opentraveldata (https://github.com/opentraveldata/opentraveldata) is generally a great source for travel related data, based mostly on Geobases and Wikipedia. Its OAG extract is a bit old, but all airport data (and more) can be found in https://github.com/opentraveldata/opentraveldata/blob/master..., which is refreshed on an almost daily basis. There are other data sources in the same folder.

Also, https://github.com/opentraveldata/geobases is a fun way to play around with Geonames/Optd data.

From your site, "Two closest airports: At 370m apart are the Horsching International Airport and Linz Aiports in Austria."

From Wikipedia, "Linz Airport, also known as Blue Danube Airport Linz and formerly Hörsching Airport"

Are you sure they aren't one and the same?

I think China has more airports than the ones listed in the site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_in_China#/med...

Thank-you for that link. I will be updating the DB in the coming month and China is one of the countries to have updated entries.

En Route Supplement Australia (ERSA) might be helpful:

http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/aip/aip.asp?pg=40&vdate=...

Unfortunately, you'll need to deal with PDFs, but they are data rich:

http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/aip/current/ersa/FAC_YSC...

This site has a total of 9300 airports. The CIA lists 13513 airports in just the US - https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Thank you for mentioning that! I could not believe when I saw "my" Germany so close to the US, because for Germany, this number must include every little sailplane field and a lot must be missing from the US. What I really wondered about is the pattern by which airports have been included. Where 100% private airports not included (because the US has an immense number of privately owned airstrips)? Even Flight Simulator X had about 20.000 airports worldwide ten years back. I also think that the USA have almost as many airports as the rest of the world combined. There are countries where private flying and airport building is virtually non-existent (take Iran for example) or heavily regulated (take Europe). So this database might be a starting point, but I wonder if there are no better databases available. May be: not for free.

The US has a lot of hobby airstrips. Let me explain it like this.

I live in northern Fort Worth. To the south of me there is a little international airport named Meacham. To the north of me there is a much large freight airport named Alliance. Down the street from my house is a small airport for personally owned airplanes. A little more than 5 miles from my house is a neighborhood built around an airstrip for personally owned airplanes.

Then of course there are the big airports that most people actually use: Love Field, DFW, Addison Executive. DFW is one of the largest and busiest airports in the world and you still have all these other airports around. Go to Fort Worth on Google Maps and search for Airports. There are some smaller airfields that don't show up even though you have all these results.

Flying is extremely regulated in the US, but that regulation is not super strict unless you are flying aircraft of a certain size or carry passengers. You have to be a certified pilot just to fly drones of a certain size.

OpenFlights is really awesome, we used it to build https://destigogo.com

Any other tips for complete airport datasets?

Anyone have a free/inexpensive source for regularly updated airport pairs for scheduled airline flights?

Wikipedia?

Map of all airports in Wikipedia: https://query.wikidata.org/embed.html#%23defaultView%3AMap%0... (slow to render)

Map of destinations from Antwerp International airport: https://query.wikidata.org/#%23Destinations%20from%20Antwerp...

Change the query to get results from any airport, or build your own.

Everything is possible with Wikidata. It's incredible that so few people know about it.

If you're only interested in "local" data then you might be able to obtain it via a software radio.

I have a cheap USB receiver hooked up to my PC so I can watch the aircraft "overhead" in real-time. Annoyingly it loses the signal when the aircraft get too low, so I cannot see them landing.

Very interesting, do you have a blog post about this?

https://www.flightradar24.com/build-your-own

As it happens I do:

https://blog.steve.fi/tracking_aircraft_in_real_time__via_so...

I’m looking for something similar for shipping ports. Anyone know where I can find it?

It doesn't have Moscow Domodedovo. That's number ten maybe in europe's top100, with 30 mln passengers actually. What use does this DB have with holes like these? F for effort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com