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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 (htt

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 https://alltheflightdeals.com) and BookWithMatrix (https://bookwithmatrix.com 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 not 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/ https://github.com/jpatokal/openflights/ [2] http://ourairports.com/data/ http://ourairports.com/data/ [3] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hroptatyr/dateutils/tzmaps/iata.tzmap; https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hroptatyr/dateutils/tzmaps... http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/ http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/ [4] https://gist.github.com/tdreyno/4278655 https://gist.github.com/tdreyno/4278655

psergeant 9y ago
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.
- knownothing 9y ago
  Is the source available?
scrollaway 9y ago
I found out about http://www.flightconnections.com/ http://www.flightconnections.com/ a couple of weeks ago when a friend linked it to me. It looks like it has fairly exhaustive data on airports including all the airports they connect to, which the OP doesn't have. However, it is lacking on everything else :)
- marsRoverDev 9y ago
  Where do these guys get their data from?
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    shrugs I'm as confused as you are!
ryandrake 9y ago
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 great deal of info digitally and for free, but this is not true for most other countries. Many countries cartographic offices (or their private contractors) even claim copyright over basic facts like “airport ABC is at location X” and “navaid DEF transmits on frequency 123”. It’s crazy that information that potentially could save lives are locked up behind rent extracting corporations and intellectual property laws.
- yazan94 9y ago
  > Don’t forget that time zone boundaries often change I always thought time zones boundaries were static... TIL
  - dagw 9y ago
    Actual time zone boundaries have on average 2-3 changes a year. Sudan recently hopped back an hour for example, a separatist state in eastern Ukraine switched to Moscow time and Russia changed the time zones of a bunch of cities last year. What does happen more often is people screwing around with Daylight savings. Each year probably a dozen countries decide to change how they're going to do daylight savings, either by canceling or reintroducing it or moving the date when the changeover happens. And the you get some real oddities like Morocco (I think it was) a few years ago the decided to temporarily suspend daylights saving during Ramadan (what do you mean your software cannot handle having an arbitrary number of dates for the start and end of daylight saving each year)
  - niftich 9y ago
    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 https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html [2] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-October/024399.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-October/024399.html [3] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2016-April/000038.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2016-April/000038...
tcmb 9y ago
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 show my subscribed destinations, I'm getting all kinds of flights from locations I haven't signed up for. Trying to edit my subscription from that page tells me that my 'email doesn't currently seem to be subscribed'. A usability issue (not sure if it's related to the suspected current performance issues) is that after creating an email subscription, the overlay doesn't close and cannot be manually closed, so that I have to reload the page and don't see that you sent me a request for confirmation.
- phsource 9y ago
  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.
rmc 9y ago
It's the goal of the OpenStreetMap project to basically have all o fhtat.
hacym 9y ago
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?

psergeant 9y ago

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.

knownothing 9y ago
Is the source available?

scrollaway 9y ago

I found out about http://www.flightconnections.com/ http://www.flightconnections.com/ a couple of weeks ago when a friend linked it to me. It looks like it has fairly exhaustive data on airports including all the airports they connect to, which the OP doesn't have. However, it is lacking on everything else :)

marsRoverDev 9y ago
Where do these guys get their data from?
- scrollaway 9y ago
  shrugs I'm as confused as you are!

ryandrake 9y ago

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 great deal of info digitally and for free, but this is not true for most other countries. Many countries cartographic offices (or their private contractors) even claim copyright over basic facts like “airport ABC is at location X” and “navaid DEF transmits on frequency 123”. It’s crazy that information that potentially could save lives are locked up behind rent extracting corporations and intellectual property laws.

yazan94 9y ago
> Don’t forget that time zone boundaries often change I always thought time zones boundaries were static... TIL
- dagw 9y ago
  Actual time zone boundaries have on average 2-3 changes a year. Sudan recently hopped back an hour for example, a separatist state in eastern Ukraine switched to Moscow time and Russia changed the time zones of a bunch of cities last year. What does happen more often is people screwing around with Daylight savings. Each year probably a dozen countries decide to change how they're going to do daylight savings, either by canceling or reintroducing it or moving the date when the changeover happens. And the you get some real oddities like Morocco (I think it was) a few years ago the decided to temporarily suspend daylights saving during Ramadan (what do you mean your software cannot handle having an arbitrary number of dates for the start and end of daylight saving each year)
- niftich 9y ago
  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 https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html [2] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-October/024399.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2016-October/024399.html [3] https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2016-April/000038.html https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2016-April/000038...

tcmb 9y ago

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 show my subscribed destinations, I'm getting all kinds of flights from locations I haven't signed up for. Trying to edit my subscription from that page tells me that my 'email doesn't currently seem to be subscribed'. A usability issue (not sure if it's related to the suspected current performance issues) is that after creating an email subscription, the overlay doesn't close and cannot be manually closed, so that I have to reload the page and don't see that you sent me a request for confirmation.

phsource 9y ago
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.

rmc 9y ago

It's the goal of the OpenStreetMap project to basically have all o fhtat.

hacym 9y ago

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?