Airdata

Rails engine for adding aviation related models and data to a web application.

Compatible with Rails 4.0

It will add 3 Active Record models to your rails application: Airports, Runways and Waypoints (including Navaids). It will add the corresponding database structure (migrations) and finally it will populate the corresponding tables of your database with data (based on AIRAC cycle 1306.)

This database is designed for training, education and flight simulation purposes! Its contents might be outdated and shall not be used for real world navigation and flight as it is unlawful and unsafe to do so!

Add this gem AND the activerecord-import gem to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'airdata'
gem "activerecord-import", "~> 0.4.1"  # Required for the data import

And then execute:

$ bundle

Run the following commands in your app directory:

rake airdata:install:migrations
rake db:migrate
rake airdata:setup

You can get information about your currently installed AIRAC cycle and the latest available one by running:

rake airdata:cycle  # =>

  Currently instaled AIRAC cycle: 1306
  Latest available AIRAC cycle: 1306

  No update is necessary!

# Or if there's a newer verion available:
rake airdata:cycle  # =>

  There's a newer cycle available.
  You can update by running: rake airdata:update

If you want to do a data update to a newer AIRAC cycle, run the following rake task for clearing up the old data and re-injecting the current one:

rake airdata:update

• Airports: 10840

• Runways: 29089

• Waypoints and navaids: 239293

• Total DB records: 279222

All data is derrived and compiled from public sources such as: OurAirports and OpenFlights

2 classes handle the heavy lifting of downloading, parsing and injecting the data within you local database: Airdata::DataDownloader and Airdata::DataInjector. Generally you won't need to deal with them directly. All the functionality you need to install is triggered via rake tasks and almost nothing there is considered public API, apart from the following public class methods:

  # Returns the currently installed AIRAC cycle:
  Airdata::DataDownloader.cycle # => 1208

  # Returns the latest available for download AIRAC cycle:
  Airdata::DataDownloader.latest_cycle # => 1301

These AR models and attribute sets will be available in your parent app, namespaced within the Airdata module and accessible like this:

 Airdata::Airports
 Airdata::Runways
 Airdata::Waypoints

Currently there are no special public methods/APIs available for these models, the engine is tailored primarily for data storage and access.

Default ordering is implemented for all 3 classes. Airports and waypoints are sorted alphabetically i.e. ordered by id, and the runways are ordered by their airport_id. Remember you can always override the default ordering by using Active Record's .reorder method

Includes one-to-many association with the Runways class.

attr_accessible :elevation, :icao, :lat, :lon, :msa, :name, :ta

has_many :runways, :dependent => :destroy

• ICAO
• Name (city)
• Latitude
• Longitude
• Elevation
• Transition altitude
• Minimum safe altitude

Includes one-to-many association with the Airports models.

attr_accessible :airport_id, :course, :elevation, :glidepath, :ils, :ils_fac
attr_accessible :ils_freq, :lat, :length, :lon, :number

belongs_to :airport

• airport_id (association)
• number
• course
• elevation
• glidepath angle
• ILS (boolean)
• ILS final approach course
• ILS frequency
• latitude on the threshold
• longitude on the threshold
• length

Regular waypoints only include :ident, :lat, :lon, :country_code. The rest is for navaids.

attr_accessible :country_code, :elevation, :freq, :ident, :lat, :lon, :name, :range

• ident
• name
• frequency
• country code
• elevation
• latitude
• longitude
• range (in MSFS)

Here's a lisk of all rake tasks that this gem adds:

rake airdata:install:migrations  # Copy migrations from airdata to application.
                                 # This is part of the initial install process.
rake airdata:setup               # Downloads and installs the latest navdata
rake airdata:cycle               # Compares your currently installed AIRAC cycle
                                 # agianst the latest available
rake airdata:truncate            # Truncate navadata tables, populated by Airdata.
                                 # Generally you don't need to run this separately,
                                 # it's automatically called during data updates
rake airdata:update              # Removes old Airdata and installs latest available
                                 # Essentially it runs the truncate task followed by the setup

• make sure to run the rake airdata:update task after updating the gem. This will ensure all latest migrations and modifications to the data structure are executed and will inject the latest available dataset

• dependencies update

• rails 4 compatibility

• updated dependencies and data

• moved away from the deprecated github downloads
• updated dependencies
• inproved setup/update processing speed
• fixed support for multiple parallel runways (left, right, center)
• other bugfixes

• added default ordering for all 3 models. Airports and waypoints/navaids are sorted by id, runways are sorted by airport_id

Copyright © 2013 Svilen Vassilev

If you find my work useful or time-saving, you can endorse it or buy me a beer:

Released under the MIT LICENSE