Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

partow.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#21

Post by tcmb »

phsource wrote: post #11

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 ge…

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.

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#22

Post by javindo »

FabHK wrote: post #18

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)…

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?

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#25

Post by rmc »

phsource wrote: post #11

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 ge…

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

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#26

Post by rcMgD2BwE72F »

twelvechairs wrote: post #6
fludlight wrote: post #5

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.

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#27

Post by bastro »

edpichler wrote: post #15
stevekemp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#28

Post by vojnovski »

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.

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#29

Post by yazan94 »

ryandrake wrote: post #17
phsource wrote: post #11

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 ge…

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 grea…

> Don’t forget that time zone boundaries often change

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

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#30

Post by dagw »

yazan94 wrote: post #29
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grea…

> 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)

Post reply on HN