Proposal: support FAA LID codes

[kylehodgson]

This list ignores a large category of airports

About 100 flights per day go in and out of San Martin Airport. It supports GA mostly, lots of training, and is also a relief airport for the San Francisco Bay Area. I'd like to add it to the list, but I feel like it wouldn't fit well because it doesn't have an IATA or an ICAO code. It does have an FAA location ID, E16. I'm personally tracking four such airports today, and I'm not very deep in to my project yet, likely I'll keep finding more. Users trying to use this list as a complete source of geo lookup info on airports (like me) are likely to keep hitting this wall.

Many airports won't be assigned IATA or ICAO codes

There are ~ 26,000 FAA "location IDs". Many of these are "relief airports", airfields, or "untowered airports". Often used for GA, but not exclusively, they often don't have ICAO or IATA codes. They do have an FAA "locator ID" or LID. I imagine other countries have similar situations.

While the FAA is a USA government institution, its not safe to assume that all airports with FAA LIDs (and no ICAO or IATA) are in the USA - Anguar airstrip, for instance in Palau has an FAA ID, no ICAO or IATA, but is not in the USA.

Proposed options

Option 1: Add a field to the current file

• I'd suggest a new field, FAA_LID; and a precedent that if new sovereign country identifier codes like this are found that they could also be added similarly.
  • Suggest adding it as the last field to the CSV to attempt to protect folks using column ordinals for parsing the file (though, anyone using "nth from the end" logic would still be impacted)

Option 2: Add a new CSV file to the repo

• Suggest similar logic and layout to the existing file, following same ISO standards for country code and region name
• Include the new FAA_LID field
• Consider keeping the existing ICAO and IATA fields

This approach would allow people to optionally adopt the new file if they wanted, and have the benefit of not breaking existing consumers of the existing file. A script could be built that extracts the ICAO and IATA only data from the new file to simplify and reduce the possibility of drift between the files - in this case, update contribution guidelines to ask people to only update the new file when making PRs to add new airports, and consider using GitHub actions or just a python script in the repo to generate the legacy ICAO / IATA file

Open to discussion!

[ip2location]

Hi @kylehodgson,

Thanks for the suggestion.

Based on our research, it seems like the FAA code are mainly used in US only. Do you have any list that contains any active airports that are located outside the US and having FAA code only besides the Angaur Airstrip? We would like to see if the numbers are good enough for us to support the code in our project.

[kylehodgson]

Analysis of the FAA LID codes taken from the encode/decode table from the FAA shows the following:

• There are 23,381 unique FAA LID codes, 60 are not in the US or its territories
• These non US LIDs are in the Bahamas, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Turks and Caicos and Palau
• Many of the LID codes have multiple records - for example BOI - when this happens, it appears to be the case that several assets from the same airport are being listed, BOI Radio, BOI VORTAC, runway 10R, 28L
• In the case of BOI, this airport also has an IATA code and ICAO code, and in this instance they all three match (give or take a K for the ICAO)
• Most airports in the list however do not have ICAO or IATA codes

My thought is, that once we've agreed on how to add these to the file we can begin adding them as necessary. I don't yet see a big file that shows lat/lng for all of these LIDs unfortunately.

Comments are open on the public Google Sheet attached.