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OpenFlights – airport and airline data

openflights.org

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Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#41

Post by thamer »

rumblestrut wrote: post #30

I wish there was open train data.

Here's my chance to plug something I wrote long ago (back in 2012), and revived earlier this month. I used the train/bus/riverboat schedules from Transport for London (TfL) to create an animated view over 24 hours of every single vehicle as it journeys through London. The 2021 version is in 4K at 60 fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rj60B7w59s – with details posted here: https://log.kv.io/post/2012/06/04/public-transports-in-londo...

"Open train data" is a bit vague without mentioning where these trains might be, but I did find the London Tube schedule[1] in GTFS[2] format, as well as the bus schedule[3] also in GTFS format. Look for your city or country name followed by "open data" and you might find interesting datasets. In the UK the National Public Transport Data Repository (NPTDR) publishes a database of every public transport journey in Great Britain for a selected week in October each year[4] (only goes until 2011 though).

[1] Tube, scheduled trips: https://hash.ai/@tfl/tfl-gtfs

[2] GTFS is a CSV-based transit data format: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference

[3] Buses, scheduled trips: https://data.bus-data.dft.gov.uk/timetable/download/

[4] NPTDR database: https://data.gov.uk/dataset/d1f9e79f-d9db-44d0-b7b1-41c216fe...

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#43

Post by amatecha »

tpmx wrote: post #38
amatecha wrote: post #31

You can get free enterprise access to a lot of the major flight tracker services by setting up an ADSB receiver and feeding the data to them. Basically they give you full access to everything as if you were paying for the top tier of their services, because you're helping increase the coverage of their data. A few such services: https://www.flightradar24.com https://flightaware.com/ https://www.radarbox.com/ https://…

Not the same thing. Scheduled future/historic flight data vs observed realtime/historic flight data.

They do give historic data, but yeah I don't know offhand which ones give comprehensive direct API access just by feeding ADS-B data. RadarBox seems to. FR24 and FA require you to contact them -- I've never done this so I don't know how much friction the process entails, or what kind of API limits you may be subject to. Probably depends on your intended application.

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#44

Post by sokoloff »

realityking wrote: post #24
sokoloff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many (most?) standards bodies charge for their standards documents and data feeds. There are obviously costs associated with running IATA; I don't see why they should be obliged to provide their data for free, especially when the typical user of such data is likely to build a for-profit business on top of it. I don't think IATA actually assigns the codes, but rather aggregates them. In the US, the FAA assigns the air…

I think the FAA will only assign the four letter ICAO code. The 3 letter IATA code is assigned by them directly: https://www.iata.org/contentassets/1277d04d575843dc80a3f613d...

If you tell me the FAA code for a US airport, I can tell you the IATA code without a database lookup and without checking with IATA.

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#45

Post by J5892 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #42

Why don't airlines provide a good free API for flights and reservations? I would think they would want developers to help make accessing their offerings and buying them easier.

Skiplagged.com (and the legal issues around it) is a good example of why they may not want that data easily accessible.

But other than that, I assume there's a lot of money in partnerships with sites like Kayak and Priceline. But I'm not even sure which direction that money flows.

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#46

Post by JamilD »

alas44 wrote: post #37
jsjohnst wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d really like to know this too, but been unable to get a price either. I also really want an API (ideally with historical data available) with fare pricing data too, but not been able to get a quote on that either.

You can both take a look at Amadeus for dev (Amadeus is the biggest GDS) https://developers.amadeus.com More info on API here https://github.com/amadeus4dev/hackathon-starter/blob/master... Disclaimer I work for Amadeus, but actually never used this API service, I'd be interested in your feedback

Thanks for those links! Didn't know Amadeus had something similar.

Just like with Sabre, it seems all the "juicy" stuff is in the Enterprise API (which is opaque on pricing and setup -- you have to contact the sales team to get access).

Do you have any insight into whether it's possible for individual developers to get access to that enterprise API, and what the fees look like?

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#47

Post by indyfromoz »

thamer wrote: post #41
rumblestrut wrote: post #30

I wish there was open train data.

Here's my chance to plug something I wrote long ago (back in 2012), and revived earlier this month. I used the train/bus/riverboat schedules from Transport for London (TfL) to create an animated view over 24 hours of every single vehicle as it journeys through London. The 2021 version is in 4K at 60 fps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rj60B7w59s – with details posted here: https://log.kv.io/post/2012/06/04/public-t…

Talking about trains and data about trains, I really dig this visualisation - https://minitokyo3d.com/

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#48

Post by notahacker »

ALittleLight wrote: post #42

Why don't airlines provide a good free API for flights and reservations? I would think they would want developers to help make accessing their offerings and buying them easier.

APIs to airline reservation systems already exist, they're just supported by the likes of Amadeus that provide the relevant IT infrastructure to the airlines as well as distribution services for travel agents and OTAs to book [nearly] all the airlines

Since finding and booking flights is actually trivially easy for the consumer already, it's actually in the interests of airlines (as well as the middlemen) to be cautious about who gets access to which API function, especially when it comes to actually selling tickets.

At the extreme end of the scale, some low cost carriers can only be booked on their website, because they make more in upsell from the booking flow than they could make with extra bookings from other channels

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#49

Post by dmitrygr »

sokoloff wrote: post #44
realityking wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the FAA will only assign the four letter ICAO code. The 3 letter IATA code is assigned by them directly: https://www.iata.org/contentassets/1277d04d575843dc80a3f613d...

If you tell me the FAA code for a US airport, I can tell you the IATA code without a database lookup and without checking with IATA.

C83

Good luck

Re: OpenFlights – airport and airline data

#50

Post by Pasorrijer »

sokoloff wrote: post #11
phsource wrote: post #7

It's ridiculous that the only original source of this data, the IATA [0], charges $700+ for this list, so kudos to OpenFlights. I can't stress just how important (and how hard) it is to get a great source of data for airports -- I've now built 3 travel-related projects (the latest, Wanderlog [ https://wanderlog.com ], keeps people's flight reservations, so uses it for an autocomplete), and it's been a key building bl…

If it’s important and hard to get this data, is it really ridiculous that a provider of the data charges $700 for it?

Oh they charge way more than $700. For a recent project, for four months of flights in North America cost roughly $5000.
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