Looking for a World Airport Database

Question

I'm looking for a database that contains all (most, many...as many as it can) world airports. I know of one such set available - http://www.world-airport-database.com/database.php - but the terms state that it's for internal use only...which kind of defeats the purpose.

The data would need to have the airport code, name, location (country, city, state/locale, zip/postal, lat/lon).

Do you know of such a set? Certainly willing to purchase such a set, free is always great too.

Answer 1

OpenFlights Licence is favourable.

"Licensing and disclaimer The OpenFlights Airport, Airline and Route Databases are made available under the Open Database License. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License.

Airport data derived OurAirports and DAFIF, as well as route data from Airline Route Mapper, is in the public domain. Airline data derived from Wikipedia may be subject to the GNU Free Documentation License. Whether these databases pass the threshold of originality and are thus copyrightable in the United States is an open question, and Contentshare does not assert the validity or lack thereof of such a claim. This data is not suitable for navigation. OpenFlights does not assume any responsibility whatsoever for its accuracy, and consequently assumes no liability whatsoever for results obtained or loss or damage incurred as a result of application of the data. OpenFlights expressly disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for any particular purpose."

http://openflights.org/data.html

Download: airports.dat (~350 KB)

(a donation is suggested to help maintain the database)

Answer 2

I would have thought that OpenStreetMap would have pretty comprehensive coverage, certainly for major airports. You can see for yourself here. According to this, OpenStreetMap contains approx 96000 aeroways (i.e. airports), so it depends how comprehensive you want to be.

Your problem then becomes:

• extracting the airports from the entire world file (20GB bz2 compressed) (see here for some pointers)
• how to get the metadata, which may be far from complete

It ought to be easy to get the country and name as a minimum (can you define "city" anyway -- don't some airports serve two?).

Answer 3

I wouldn't go with OSM.As already mentioned the processsing of the planet.osm would be time consuming - but may be a use of osmosis and filter the data could help out. My experience shows that the airports data are not complete if speaking about the attribution and its often really hard to filter the data to make some valuable output. I would recomend the geonames.org source - the data are pretty good and consist all the major civilan/ millitary airport worldwide.

Answer 4

Naturalearthdata.com has this set in shapefile format. Contain name, IATA code, GPS code, link:

Derives from Mile High Club, a detailed GIS compilation of world wide airports that is in the public domain.

http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/airports/

Answer 5

There's really only one database out there if you want it for operational purposes. Most of the ones we came across before this were for Flight Simulators.

This one is used by an actual Flight Planning organisation so the data is correct and useful. And there's a sample you can see before you purchase. I think there are about 6000 airports in it, which is about right for international ops.

Go here: http://flightservicebureau.org/world-airports-database/

And the sample is here: http://shop.fsbureau.org/online/database

Answer 6

Take a look at this site. http://ourairports.com/data/ You can download as CSV and they update the data regularly.
Otherwise, it's per Country and each Countries datasets or Region like EuroControl for Europe, FAA for USA. You can also check open data sites for airport data.

Answer 7

Adding a more recent answer here -

Open Street Map

1. Osmdata.xyz, https://download.osmdata.xyz/, allows you to download a global extract of OSM data by primary feature, so in this case you'd download "aeroways," which includes a TON of airport-related data, including runways, gates, etc., as well as a lot of other non-related airport data, so you'd have to clean it up.

2. Overpass Turbo, http://overpass-turbo.eu/, is an interface that allows you to write Overpass API queries to extract more specific airport data from OSM than you get with Osmdata.xyz above, but writing the queries there comes with a little bit of a learning curve.

OurAirports

3. OurAirports, https://ourairports.com/data/, fantastic dataset of global airports with the kind of attributes you'd expect in a global airport dataset (Ident codes, size, elevation, scheduled service, etc.)

Possible Bonus Datasets

4. ICAO World Airport Database 2019, https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=957b843cfcc64b8d852c5eb3beeefb99, I believe they are also using OSM and OurAirports data, but there's so much going on in this map, there has to be way more than that. This dataset looks pretty comprehensive, but I didn't immediately see how to download it and didn't try as I was already covered by the first two datasets I found. But it might be worth taking a look at, too.