Every page on AirportIQ is generated from an offline build pass against the following public data sources. The build runs on demand from the project's seed.php script and writes JSON snapshots to disk; the request-time PHP templates only read those snapshots. This separation means that no live API call sits between you and a page load.
Airport master record
The primary source for every airport entry is the OurAirports public CSV, which aggregates the FAA's NASR (National Airspace System Resource) Airport Master Record / Form 5010 dataset together with ICAO identifiers for international cross-reference. The CSV is published as a community service and is the de-facto canonical form of the FAA's data outside the agency's own download portal at adip.faa.gov. The FAA also publishes its Airport Data & Contact Information (Form 5010) directly, which is the underlying source for OurAirports' US records.
Cross-reference for global codes
For IATA and time-zone cross-checks we use the OpenFlights airports.dat dataset published in the jpatokal/openflights repository on GitHub. This is a long-running community dataset of roughly 7,000 airports worldwide, maintained as an open file and licensed for free use.
FAA region map
The nine FAA administrative regions and their state assignments come from the FAA's official "Regional Offices" page. Region headquarters cities and the per-state grouping are stable across publication years.
Airline directory
The airline directory is a curated snapshot of US-certificated carriers built from the public Wikipedia article List of airlines of the United States together with each carrier's own published "About" page. We hand-maintain this list rather than scraping it at request time because Wikipedia's HTML structure changes too frequently for an automated scraper to be reliable.
Traffic, parking, and TSA estimates
Where individual airport pages cite an annual-departures figure, a "typical destinations" count, a parking rate band, or a TSA wait-time band, those numbers are projected from the FAA's airport-class definitions plus public BTS T-100 and TSA throughput baselines. They are stable estimates intended for orientation, not real-time data. For live traffic data, consult the BTS Transtats portal; for live security wait times, the TSA publishes guidance and many airports publish live checkpoint feeds on their own sites.
What AirportIQ does not do
We do not call live flight-status APIs, weather services, or carrier reservation systems. The site is a static reference directory generated from periodic snapshots, not a real-time information service.