Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
71 lines (50 loc) · 3.78 KB

API.md

File metadata and controls

71 lines (50 loc) · 3.78 KB

api.aeronautical.info

General Notes on Usage

If you plan on building something that uses this API please note the "dev" in the URL. This is not a "production-grade" service and is run on a shoestring budget. On the other hand, though, it's had pretty darned good uptime and it's offered completely free of charge to you. If you are interested in using the API I provide for anything important, please let me know and maybe we can work out some arrangement for a paid, "production-grade" service. Further, if you would be so kind, please include the parameter appid in your query string with a value that uniquely identifies your application. For example, for my app loggingnight I pass appid=loggingnight in the query string. Knowing what applications use my service is both interesting to me and also helps me justify the expense to myself. :)

Currently you can query for airport, runway, and runway end information.

What's a runway end? Well, the FAA breaks a normal runway into two parts: base end and reciprocal end. For an example, runway "18/36" has a base end of "18" and a reciprocal end of "36". In the FAA's data set, some attributes belong to a runway as a whole and some attributes belong to runway ends.

All queries are done with HTTP GETs and query strings. I don't do anything with POSTs or any other methods at the moment.

Query strings can be broken down into two parts: identifying what you want to search for, and specifying what information you want to see. I'll show examples below.

How to query airport information

The required query string parameter to search for an airport is airport. It accepts either FAA or ICAO airport identifers and returns basic airport information.

All of the interesting information is grouped into attribute sets based on the groupings found in the FAA's NASR subscription text file. To see them, add include parameters for the groups you want.

Currently available attribute groups:

  • demographic
  • ownership
  • geographic
  • faaservices
  • fedstatus
  • inspection
  • aptservices
  • facilities
  • basedaircraft
  • annualops
  • additional
  • remarks
  • runways
  • attendance

How to query runway information

To get information for a specific runway, you just need to add one more parameter to the query string in addition to airport: runway.

You may notice that runway names usually have a forward-slash in them. This needs to be urlencoded as %2F. This is annoying, so you have the option to specify only one end of the runway.

include parameter groups for runways are:

  • additional
  • runway_ends

Yeah, runways don't have all that much interesting information. Most of the interesting stuff is in runway_ends.

How to query runway end information

Now we have three required query string parameters: airport, runway, and runway_end.

You'll notice that even though we abbreviated the runway name from "10C/28C" to just "10C", we can still specify a runway_end of "28C" and get the information for that end of the runway.

include parameter groups for runway ends are:

  • geographic
  • lighting
  • object
  • additional