Public Aviation Databases

SixPapaCharlie

SixPapaCharlie

May the force be with you
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Aug 8, 2013
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I am looking to see if there is a published database I can hook into to download tabular information on airports.

Right now when I fly, I print the document below and fold it in half and stick it on my kneeboard.

I have written a program where I can enter my departure airport and destination, and it will fill in a lot of the values and print it in the format I like that I can fold in half.

It is based on values that I have manually prepopulated. I have put in the effort to only add a few local fields that I frequent.

I am going to 2 new airports in the next couple days and was going to update the program and got to wondering if I could just hook into an online AFD database somewhere. Is anyone aware of such a database?

This is what I fly with it is a mail merge word doc that I generate on the fly but a lot of it is manual input especially if not one of the few airports I have added to the database.

999971476318.jpg
 
Take a look at the Data Downloads section on this page:
http://www.faa.gov/airports/airport_safety/airportdata_5010/menu/

Not sure if that's exactly what you want, but you can pretty much get all the data from the FAA with some looking around, granted the formatting always sucks ass and it can be a ***** to parse.

I'm not aware of any decent modern web service that provides this stuff in a format that doesn't suck, but it may be out there, hell maybe you should build it :)

A less than legit, but nobody would probably ever notice, method would just be to do some packet sniffing on aviation apps that have the data you want then use their API(s). Unlikely they protect their API(s) properly. I'd start with Foreflight ;)

Delete all the data in Foreflight, setup some packet sniffing, then load an airport in the App and take a look at what network traffic there is. Not that I would ever do such a thing....
 
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I've actually done this exact project a few different ways. Unfortunately they are all in MATLAB, so unless you have access to that I can't share code. I can share data sources though!

https://nfdc.faa.gov/xwiki/bin/view/NFDC/WebHome

This is, as near as I can tell, where every company that makes a digital aviation product gets there data. You can either download the whole 56-day NASR subscription database every two months and get your data from there or you could scrape it all from the airport data link right underneath that.

The NASR is a pretty fascinating (and frustrating) set of data, with almost everything you need to create your own flight planning tool.

There used to be an AFD 'database' out there somewhere that consisted of an excel file of every active airport in the US. I haven't been able to find it recently though, so just wrote a script to parse the NASR APT file.
 
Yeah, the NFDC data is a pain in the backside to parse. Who the hell combines multiple tables in the same damned file, where the format of each row is determined by the first field on each row? Grrrrr....

That said, once you parse it, there's a crap-ton of data in those files.
 
JeffDG said:
Yeah, the NFDC data is a pain in the backside to parse. Who the hell combines multiple tables in the same damned file, where the format of each row is determined by the first field on each row? Grrrrr....

That said, once you parse it, there's a crap-ton of data in those files.
Click to expand...

BTW, they have their data in XML now as well (it's in "additional data").
 
If you'll just fork over the $$$ to upgrade your metal landing calculator to the metal departure, enroute, and landing calculator w/data subscription it will cover all that and more!
 
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