Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

partow.net

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#31

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?

As it happens I do:

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

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#33

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...

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#34

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.

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#35

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…

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?

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#36

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…

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?

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#37
post #21

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 s…

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.

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#38
post #29

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

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...

Re: Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World

#40

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…

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.
Post reply on HN