jpatokal

openflights

PHP2017–2021

jpatokal / openflights

openflights

Website for storing flight information, rendering paths on a zoomable world map and calculating statistics, with plenty of free airline, airport and route data.

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4Distinct people

5Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1.7KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Website for storing flight information, rendering paths on a zoomable world map and calculating statistics, with plenty of free airline, airport and route data.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-11-28 08:28:49 UTC to 2021-04-27 15:46:41 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

5 sources

phsource·Apr 27, 2021

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 block for all of them. The main datasets we use are: - OpenFlights [1]: mentioned in this post, but this dataset was great since it had timezone too. - OurAirports [2]: no timezone here, but the "type" and "scheduled_service" columns in this dataset are essential. "Type" lets you distinguish between small/medium/large airports, and "scheduled_service" lets you easily filter out airports without real flights (which you often might

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not care about). - Random other GitHub Gist [3]: I have no idea where this data comes from, but it was surprisingly complete and has a few golden nuggets like "num_flights" and "runway_length" in addition to "timezone". The presence of a "woeid" suggests Yahoo-related origins, but it's hard to be sure. - We now supplement this with airports from autocomplete APIs like Skyscanner's, because they're still the most up-to-date. Long story short, it'd be AWESOME to have one complete, updated database with all this data in one place. This kind of data really should be public and a public service, but until then it's unfortunately up to the community. [0] https://www.iata.org/en/publications/store/airline-coding-di... [1] https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/ [2] http://ourairports.com/data/ [3] https://gist.github.com/tdreyno/4278655

In OpenFlights – airport and airline data

alifaziz·Apr 27, 2021

..and link to github https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights

In OpenFlights – airport and airline data

_0nac·Apr 13, 2019

https://openflights.org/ uses the Haversine formula (and much more!) to not just compute distance, but plot great circle flight routes on a world map: https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/blob/master/js/great... There are a lot of interesting edge cases regarding routes that cross the dateline, the North Pole, etc. Most of the code was taken from Movable Type's incredible library of lat/long code: http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html

In Haversine Formula

ediardo·Mar 26, 2019

I just found this large dataset [1] of airlines on github. It contains more than 6k records, with their ICAO and IATA codes. [1] - https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/blob/master/data/air...

In Show HN: What's My Aircraft?

phsource·Nov 28, 2017

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 getting these from: - OpenFlights [1]: this dataset was great since it had timezone too, which was really helpful for calculating flight lengths, etc. - OurAirports [2]: no timezone here, but the "type" and "scheduled_service" columns in this dataset are essential. "Type" lets you distinguish between small/medium/large airports, and "scheduled_service" lets you easily filter out airports without real flights (which you often might n

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ot care about). - IATA tzmap [3]: this was used for filling in timezone data and is derived from the Geonames database. - Random other GitHub Gist [4]: I have no idea where this data comes from, but it was surprisingly complete and has a few golden nuggets like "num_flights" and "runway_length" in addition to "timezone". The presence of a "woeid" suggests Yahoo-related origins, but it's hard to be sure. Long story short, it'd be AWESOME to have one complete, updated database with all this data in one place, but part of the struggle is definitely having more data than just longitude/latitude. [1] https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/ [2] http://ourairports.com/data/ [3] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hroptatyr/dateutils/tzmaps...; http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/ [4] https://gist.github.com/tdreyno/4278655

In Show HN: Airport Locations from Around the World