About AeroRoute Guide
AeroRoute Guide is a static, server-rendered directory of the world's commercial aviation network. We built it for travelers, planners, and aviation enthusiasts who want a clean view of who flies where, without ads pretending to be articles, autoplaying video, or a single-page app that hides the data behind a spinner.
What's in the directory
Every page is built from a snapshot of the OpenFlights public dataset of airports, airlines, and scheduled routes. The current snapshot has 6,071 airports with valid IATA codes, 983 active airlines, and 66,934 scheduled routes covering 235 countries. A small PHP application renders each page on request. There's no JavaScript framework, no database server, and no API to call.
How pages are organised
Pages are organised the way travelers actually think about flying. Start broad and work your way down, or jump straight to a code you already have:
- By country. The countries index lists every country on file with its airport and airline counts. Each country page covers the airports and carriers registered there.
- By US state. The US states index covers all 50 states, plus DC and Puerto Rico. We assign each US airport to the nearest state by geographic centroid, so a small airport sitting near a state line can land under its neighbour.
- By airport. Each airport page shows the airport's IATA and ICAO codes, location, time zone, and tables of destinations and operators on file.
- By airline. Each airline page shows the carrier's IATA and ICAO codes, home country, callsign, and a sample of routes operated under that code.
- By route. The routes section ranks city pairs by how many distinct airline codes file against them. Treat that count as a rough signal of how well-served a market is.
Data source and methodology
The primary source is the OpenFlights database. The seed script in this project downloads airports.dat, airlines.dat, and routes.dat from openflights.org/data, keeps the airports with three-letter IATA codes, keeps the active airlines with two-character IATA codes, and joins routes back to both ends of each pair.
Country grouping uses the country name as the OpenFlights record gives it. For US state grouping, we take each US airport's latitude and longitude and assign it to the closest of 52 state-level centroids (50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico) using haversine distance. Every state ends up with a populated page that way, but the result doesn't follow official state lines exactly. A small airport near a border can get filed under the neighbour.
The "operators on file" count on each route page is the number of distinct airline-route entries in the OpenFlights routes table. It isn't a count of weekly flights or seats, so read it as a relative signal of how well-served a market is, not as a published schedule.
What this directory is not
AeroRoute Guide is a reference, not a booking engine. It doesn't show fares, real-time schedules, or seat availability. The OpenFlights routes snapshot is a community-contributed list of city pairs that airlines have operated. Read it as a slowly changing record of which markets each carrier flies, not as proof that any specific flight runs on any specific day. Always confirm schedules and bookings with the airline before you travel.
Why a multi-page server-rendered site
Most people land on pages like these from a search engine, not from a homepage. Every URL here maps to a real HTML document with its own title, meta description, and structured data block. Pages render on the server and don't need JavaScript to read. That makes them easy to crawl, easy to print, and pleasant to share as plain links.
Source code and licensing
The OpenFlights dataset is distributed under the Open Database License. Full terms are at openflights.org. AeroRoute Guide republishes derived statistics (airport directories, airline summaries, route counts) and points back to the underlying source.