Introduction

traffic already provides aircraft information via either Junzi's or OpenSky's aircraft database. I find myself needing to filter out helicopters or non land planes: given that the aircraft database has a typecode column for the ICAO aircraft type designator it would make (my?) life easier to have the possibility to join it with the Aircraft Type Designator dataset from ICAO.

Goal

Extend traffic.data.aircraft with (and/or make available on its own, say doc8643at) a dataset that contains ICAO's Aircraft Type Designator information.

ICAO web page for Doc 8643 is at https://www.icao.int/publications/DOC8643/ It provides a search facility: https://www.icao.int/publications/DOC8643/Pages/Search.aspx

If you look behind the scenes 😁 you can see that the underlying dataset can be scraped with:

import requests
import json
import pandas as pd

doc8643_url = r = "https://www4.icao.int/doc8643/External/AircraftTypes"
r = requests.post(doc8643_url)
doc8643at = pd.json_normalize(r.json())
doc8643at.columns = doc8643at.columns.str.lower()
doc8643at = doc8643at.rename(columns={
    "modelfullname": "model",
    "manufacturercode": "manufacturer_code",
    "aircraftdescription": "aircraft_description",
    "enginecount": "engine_count",
    "enginetype": "engine_type"
    }).drop(columns=['wtg'])

model	description	wtc	designator	manufacturer_code	aircraft_description	engine_count	engine_type
Dornier 328JET	L2J	M	J328	328 SUPPORT SERVICES	LandPlane	2	Jet
450 Ultra	L1P	L	UL45	3XTRIM	LandPlane	1	Piston
Ultra	L1P	L	UL45	3XTRIM	LandPlane	1	Piston
550 Trener	L1P	L	TR55	3XTRIM	LandPlane	1	Piston
Trener	L1P	L	TR55	3XTRIM	LandPlane	1	Piston
...	...	...	...	...	...	...	...
Z-526 Skydevil	L1P	L	Z26	ZLIN	LandPlane	1	Piston
Z-526 Trener Master	L1P	L	Z26	ZLIN	LandPlane	1	Piston
Z-626	L1P	L	Z26	ZLIN	LandPlane	1	Piston
Z-726 Universal	L1P	L	Z26	ZLIN	LandPlane	1	Piston
Savage	L1P	L	SAVG	ZLIN AVIATION	LandPlane	1	Piston

10316 rows × 9 columns

And similarly for Manufactures Codes at https://www.icao.int/publications/DOC8643/Pages/Manufacturers.aspx , say docs8643mc

Motivating Use-case

I am generally interested in analysing IFR flights, so if I could have ICAO aircraft type datasets (doc8643at and doc8643mc) joined and available in traffic.data.aircraft I would be able to apply the following filter

t_ifr = (t.aircraft_data()
            # remove GA flights:
            .query('description not in ["L1P","L2P","H1P", "H1T","H2T"]')
            # remove special designator flights
            .query('aircraft_description not in ["Gyrocopter", "Tiltrotor"])
            .query('aircraft_description not in ["Amphibian", "Helicopter"])
)

Similarly I could study piston-only flights, ... and then apply the relevant queries.