export of all airport nodes?

General talk
1

I am in search of a database of all airports across the world. Currently I have a dataset that contains about 40,000 airports, but the data is very messy and it’s hard for me to maintain it.

The OpenStreetMap project seems to have a lot of airports in the system, so I was hoping there was some way to download an XML file or something with all the coordinates, airport names and identifiers of all airports. Is this possible?

Also, does anyone know about how many airports there are in the database?

2

There’s an XAPI (extendedAPI) where you can download all this. The wiki says every airport has the tag combination aeroway=areodrome . Not sure wheter there are nodes tagged like this as well.
http://www.informationfreeway.org/api/0.6/way[aeroway=aerodrome]
This Link will provide you an XML with all airports. Can be quite big. If you want to search nodes replace “way” by “node”.
Here’s some further information about the XAPI: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/XAPI

3

Be careful about the information you get. Sometimes “Airports” for model aircrafts are also tagged as aerodrome (here in Germany).

4

It also includes former airports (annoying since they show up at low zooms).

5

And not all airports have a POI. I usually put the information in the area of the airport.