Extracting airport data from World Airports

Overview

A quick API query to extract airport data, in particular the aerodrome reference point in R.

httr and jsonlite

{httr} and {jsonlite} super powers to help:

################## AIRPORT INFORMATION ##################################
# https://www.airport-data.com/api/ap_info.json?icao=ESSA
library(httr)
library(jsonlite)

# helper function to retrieve apt information
get_apt_info <- function(.icao){
  request <- httr::GET("https://www.airport-data.com/api/ap_info.json", query = list(icao=.icao))
  payload <- jsonlite::fromJSON(rawToChar(request$content))
  payload <- tibble::as_tibble(payload)
  return(payload)
}

apt <- get_apt_info("ESSA") %>% 
  rename(ICAO = icao, LAT = latitude, LON = longitude) %>%
  mutate(LAT = as.numeric(LAT), LON = as.numeric(LON))

Have fun.