AeroCommons

Navigation Data

Open-source aeronautical data for pyEfis and the MakerPlane avionics stack — airports, terrain, water and roads, free to download and verify.

Download data packs

Pick what you fly with. Every pack is content-hashed and the catalog is signed — your EFIS verifies it before installing.

Select one or more packs above.
Loading the catalog…

How to use these on the Pi

  1. Over the air, on the EFIS (simplest): do it right on the touchscreen — no computer needed.
    1. On the Navigation Data screen (it shows at start-up; in flight, tap the amber DATA flag), tap Update.
    2. Choose the source — Internet, or a USB drive if one is plugged in.
    3. Tap a pack row to check the data you want. Packs you already have start checked; unchecking one removes it to free space. Each row shows its size, and the screen shows the drive’s free space.
    4. Tap Install selected. A progress bar tracks each pack; when it finishes you’re back at the status screen, up to date.
    Your choices are remembered, so scheduled background updates keep that same set current.
    Prefer a terminal? Over SSH, pyefis-data update pulls everything you’ve opted into; the selection lives in ~/.makerplane/pyefis/data.yaml (start from the sample, which documents every setting).
  2. USB / offline (hangar with no Wi-Fi): select packs above, click Download selected — it grabs the packs plus the signed manifest.json and manifest.json.minisig. Put them all in a folder named makerplane-data/ on a USB stick and plug it into the Pi. Then either tap Update on the EFIS and choose the USB drive as the source, or run pyefis-data import /path/to/makerplane-data.

Where this data comes from

No secret sauce. Here is every source and exactly what we do to it.

DataSourceWhat we do
Airports & runways FAA NASR (US Gov, public domain) + OurAirports (public domain) US airports from the 28-day FAA NASR CSV (the APT base/runway/runway-end tables joined into an indexed SQLite database). Airports outside the US — e.g. Canada, where the official data isn’t freely available — come from the community-maintained OurAirports dataset as separate region packs that merge with the FAA data on the device.
Obstacles FAA Digital Obstacle File (US Gov, public domain) Parse the DOF (towers, antennas, stacks…) into a spatially-indexed SQLite database, on the 56-day cycle.
Terrain Copernicus GLO-30 (ESA/Copernicus, redistribution permitted) 30 m (1 arc-second) global elevation — including high latitudes SRTM cannot provide. Converted from the Copernicus GeoTIFFs to standard HGT tiles, grouped by region, and zipped.
Water OpenStreetMap (ODbL) + Natural Earth (public domain) Coastline and inland-water polygons, stored in an R-tree SQLite database for fast lookup.
Roads OpenStreetMap (ODbL) Major highways (motorway/trunk), line-simplified (Douglas–Peucker) and stored in an R-tree SQLite database.

How packs are made trustworthy. Every pack is hashed with SHA-256. The catalog (manifest.json) lists those hashes and is signed with an ed25519 key (minisign format); the device verifies the signature and each hash before it installs anything — a bad or tampered download can never replace good data. The whole pipeline is open source: makerplane-data and pyEfis.

For Experimental / Amateur-Built use. This data is provided as-is with no warranty and must not be used as a primary navigation source. You are responsible for keeping current data — the EFIS annunciates when a pack has expired, but verify against official publications.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Contains modified Copernicus data. FAA data courtesy of the U.S. Government. Non-US airport data from OurAirports (public domain).