We put this data together using the following sources, from openflights.org (February 2021)

airports.dat

routes.dat

N.B. Warning: The third-party that OpenFlights uses for route data ceased providing updates in June 2014. The current data is of historical value only.

The OpenFlights Airport, Airline, Plane and Route Databases are made available under the Open Database License.

We are making this data available here on the same basis as above. The files are in GeoPackage format and can easily be viewed in QGIS or any other modern GIS or similar software.


The files:

airline_flows_all.gpkg - this is the basic poitn to point file, plotted from the original csv. It won't wrap nicely round a globe but it will be fine for most visualisations. There are just under 67,000 lines in the file.

airline_flows_all_with_dist.gpkg - same as above, but with two enhancements. First, it is 'densified', meaning that each line is made up of abotu 100 points, instead of just an start and end vertice. This means it will wrap nicely round a globe view in QGIS. The second thing is that we added in a KM field, to show how long each flow line is. This was done in a projected coordinate system.

airline_flows_top_10_by_country_dens_100.gpkg - this is a subset of the main file, with only flights from the top 10 countries by passenger number included - based on where airlines are located.

airports_all.gpkg - this has all world airports in it.


There are also two files that have been mapped using great circle routes - giving a more realistic representation of the routes planes fly. These files also allow you to correctly visualise flights that cross the international date line.