Airline Timetable Fun

Peter Rukavina

While I’ve made great use of the Air Canada website in recent years, it does suffer from one thing common to most airline sites: it’s great if you know where you want to fly and when, but not very useful if you just want to explore the possibilites of flying, well, wherever.

To this end, I present these XML files for Air Canada and Star Alliance, which I derived from their latest timetables. They contain information about all of the cities that Air Canada and Star Alliance fly between, along with the distance between the cities.

I’d welcome the inventive and talented among the readership to take this file and make something fun, artistic, creative and/or useful from it.

These little applications, for Air Canada and Star Alliance are my contribution. Let the games begin.

Comments

Submitted by Dan Brickley on

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This is pretty cool :)

How did you get the timetable data?
Scraping or do they expose it in XML already? I’d love to experiment with
this stuff…

Submitted by Peter Rukavina on

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Both Air Canada and Star Alliance use software from Goldenware Travel Technologies to handle their timetable publishing tasks. As a result, the PDF versions of the schedules are similarly structured. I was able to convert the PDF versions of each schedule to ASCII text (using the pdftotext part of xpdf), and then parse the individual city pairs out using a perl script that looks for patterns. There’s just enough structure in the schedule files to allow this to happen. Adding the actual flight schedule wouldn’t be much more difficult.

Submitted by Lars Marius Garshol on

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I’d be very interested to see the flight schedule information (as well as operating airline, flight code, etc) added. Could you do that?

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About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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