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airdata: rails engine for adding aviation navdata

Another gem release, and this time it's a rails engine, so it requires a rails application: airdata

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

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](#data-stats) (currently based on AIRAC cycle 1208, but the data is updateable and the gem provides the tools to do so).

Installation within parent app

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

gem 'airdata'
gem "activerecord-import", "~> 0.2.9"  # Required for the data injection

And then execute:

$ bundle

Run the following commands in your app directory:

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

Updating the data

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

rake airdata:cycle  # =>

  Currently instaled AIRAC cycle: 1208
  Latest available AIRAC cycle: 1208

  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

Data stats

  • Airports: 10775
  • Runways: 28977
  • Navaids: 16300

  • Waypoints: 214400

  • Total DB records: 270472

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

Lib classes

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 # => 1206

  # Returns the latest available for download AIRAC cycle:
  Airdata::DataDownloader.latest_cycle # => 1208

Models and their attributes

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.

Airports

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

Runways

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

Waypoints (includes Navaids)

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)

Rake tasks

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

Download

As always the packaged gem is available on rubygems and the source and documentation are on github.

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