Aviation API

The API includes approximately 7,900 IATA-coded commercial/passenger airports and approximately 5,300 airlines worldwide. Airports are limited to those with an assigned IATA code, so general-aviation airfields and heliports without an IATA code are not included. Airline IATA codes are populated only where known — many airline records carry only an ICAO/primary code — so you should handle null code fields in your integration.

Yes. For airports, a 3-character code resolves IATA first then ICAO, and a 4-character code resolves ICAO first then IATA. For airlines, a 2-character code resolves IATA first and a 3-character code resolves ICAO first with a fallback to the source primary-key map. All code matching is case-insensitive, so 'jfk' and 'JFK', or 'aal' and 'AAL', return the same result.

Send a lat and lon (in decimal degrees, latitude -90 to 90 and longitude -180 to 180) to /aviation/v1/airports/nearest. The API computes the great-circle (haversine) distance from that point to every airport in the dataset and returns the closest airports sorted ascending by distance. Each result includes a precise distance_km value, and the response echoes your origin coordinate. Use the optional limit parameter (default 20, max 100) to control how many airports are returned.

Pass your API key as the ?apikey= query parameter on every request, for example /aviation/v1/airports/JFK?apikey=YOUR_KEY. On the RapidAPI marketplace, authentication is handled with the standard X-RapidAPI-Key and X-RapidAPI-Host headers and your subscription tier governs your monthly quota and rate limit.

Yes. The Basic tier is free with 1,000 requests per month and a 5 req/s rate limit, ideal for prototyping and evaluation. The Pro tier ($12/month) includes 100,000 requests per month at 20 req/s, and the Ultra tier ($49/month) includes 1,000,000 requests per month at 50 req/s. All tiers include the full airport and airline datasets and every endpoint.

The API returns clean, predictable errors. A 400 is returned for a missing or malformed code, when a search endpoint is called without at least one filter (q, country, or city/active), or when lat/lon are missing, non-numeric or out of range. A 404 is returned when no airport or airline matches the supplied code. Each error response contains a descriptive 'error' message you can surface or log.

Absolutely. The partial, case-insensitive search endpoints are designed for this. For airports, query the q parameter against name/city/IATA/ICAO and optionally filter by country or city; for airlines, query q against name/IATA/ICAO/callsign. Request a small limit (for example 10–20) and debounce user input so responses stay fast. Because the data is edge-served and read-only, typical responses return in well under 50ms.