It seems that although many airports in the US have a tag that shows the airports FAA identifier, nominatim doesn’t return any results if the FAA identifier is used instead of the ICAO code.
In the US, airports are often referred to by a 3 character alphanumeric code. Particularly smaller airports/aerodromes. Larger airports get a 3-letter code and ironically these are often referred to using full ICAO ID - adds a ‘K’ on the front. For pilots in the US it is unexpected to have to use 4-digit ICAO code for these smaller airports…is there a way to fix this?
I suppose I should have tried a few more, but I searched for AKH. I think it found an airport in Saudi Arabia even though AKH is listed as an FAA tag for KAKH.
I also searched for UT9 which is a tag I added recently, and airport was not found.
SJC is a very large airport and as such seems to have a 3-letter IATA code that matches it’s FAA identifier. Seems that nominatim is finding it based on IATA vs. the FAA ID. IATA codes are only assigned to large commercial airports, many smaller airports do not have an IATA code, but they will have an ICAO ID and FAA ID in the US.
In some older issues, Nominatim’s maintainer has expressed a degree of skepticism about whether IATA codes should be indexed so prominently or other regional coding schemes at all. Apparently short names like this can create problems for the overall index, ambushing users asking for unrelated things.
I can’t speak to the use of these codes in other countries, but I concur with you that the FAA IDs for commercial airports are very well-known and well-used in the U.S. They’re often more familiar than the airports’ proper names, to the point that people will routinely use an FAA ID as a nickname for the city outside the context of transportation (as in SJC). For cities, other abbreviation schemes are common, especially in sports, but none that we’d be mapping. Amtrak station codes are quite obscure by comparison. The closest analogue I can think of is the fad of referring to a metropolitan area by its main telephone area code.
I can add the FAA code to Nominatim, although I suspect that you’ll still have trouble finding your airport sometimes when only using the FAA code. 3-letter codes are just so overused that it is difficult to get the right context. Right now the biggest airport in Germany doesn’t show up when searching for FRA. Being more specific helps: FRA airport This will be much worse for small provincial airports with no importance whatsover. Even with FAA codes being searchable, you will always have to add context information to get the right result.
I would expect that the ones which are really known on a nation-wide level have an IATA code which, if I understand this discussion correctly, is the same as the FAA code. That part should be covered by IATA already being searchable. For the smaller regional airports, I doubt that knowledge of these codes goes beyond direct users of the airport.
Not a reason to not include the FAA codes at all but it is a reason why it likely wouldn’t be a good idea to boost such codes to the point where searching for them without context turns up the airport result.
Right, quite a few public airports have an IATA code that differs from the FAA LID, but none of them is a major metropolitan airport as far as I can tell. Many are county general aviation or executive airports. Some have scheduled passenger service, but they’re either seasonal tourist destinations or remote Alaskan towns.
Well, the US has something like 13,000 airports, a small percentage of those have IATA codes. Don’t forget that pilots of even small aircraft do use Open Street Maps to plan flights to airports distant from them, and US pilots are likely to use FAA IDs rather than ICAO.
Maybe it just needs to be an education thing to let them know they should use ICAO or IATA IDs if available.
Another angle is that Nominatim might not necessarily be the best tool for them. Nominatim is a general-purpose name search tool, and pilots looking up by FAA codes is fairly specialized. But as long as the FAA ID is tagged in OSM, it can be found.
The difficulty here is that the search box on OSM’s homepage is designed for a general audience, so prioritizing FAA LIDs unconditionally over other things may result in some surprises.
Maybe keyword operators would allow for regional coding schemes to avoid crosstalk with other querying needs. For example, I’d imagine that someone aware of the competing airport identifier schemes might query for something like “IATA HHH” or “FAA HXD” to find Hilton Head Airport.
Even if it isn’t possible to fully accommodate the needs of general aviation pilots, the underlying Nominatim tool also has a more structured query form that lets you filter the results to airports, and one could in principle set up a custom instance tailored to aviation.
Searching for the FAA code works now subject to these two restrictions:
There is no special refresh of the database, so the codes will only start to show up gradually as OSM data is edited.
Local airports will often not show up as the first result or even on the first page. Adding “airport” to the search will help and usually ensure that the requested airport is the first and only result.
If you want to build a specialised search for websites for pilots etc, simply look out for 3/4-letter-codes and add the “airport” keyword client-side before sending the query off to Nominatim.