ourairports-mcp-server

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  <h1>@cyanheads/ourairports-mcp-server</h1>
  <p><b>Resolve airport codes (IATA/ICAO/GPS/local), search airports, find the nearest by coordinate, and look up runways, navaids, and radio frequencies from the bundled public-domain OurAirports dataset via MCP. STDIO or Streamable HTTP.</b>
  <div>6 Tools • 1 Resource</div>
  </p>
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**Public Hosted Server:** [https://ourairports.caseyjhand.com/mcp](https://ourairports.caseyjhand.com/mcp)

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---

## Overview

`ourairports-mcp-server` is the static aviation reference layer for resolving airport identifiers and grounding coordinates. It answers *what exists* — the catalog of airports, their codes, runways, navaids, and radio frequencies — to complement live aviation services that answer *what is happening* (weather, positions).

The entire [OurAirports](https://ourairports.com/) dataset is dedicated to the public domain and published as flat CSVs. Those six CSV files — airports, runways, navaids, airport frequencies, countries, and regions (~178k rows, ~20 MB) — are **bundled into the package** and baked into the Docker image at build time. At startup the server parses them into in-memory indices; every tool is then a local query. The result has no API key, no rate limit, and no upstream dependency to inherit an outage from.

How the working model fits together:

- **Code resolution across five identifier spaces.** Airports carry IATA, ICAO, GPS, local, and the OurAirports `ident`. A single `code` parameter resolves against a unified index (priority: ident → ICAO → IATA → GPS → local), and the response echoes the full code set so an ambiguous national code is self-correcting. A missing code (no IATA for a small field) is reported as `null`, never a 404.
- **Nearest-neighbour by great-circle distance.** Coordinate lookups run a haversine scan over a flat `Float64Array` of every airport (or navaid) position and return the nearest results ranked by distance, each with its bearing — sub-millisecond at this scale, no spatial index needed.
- **Honest sparsity.** Absent upstream fields (no elevation, null runway dimensions) surface as unknown. Capped result lists disclose truncation.

OurAirports is community-edited. The data is surfaced as-is and is **not authoritative for real flight operations** — treat it the way you would any crowd-sourced reference.

## Tools

Six read-only tools, all local queries against the bundled index — code resolution and detail, airport and runway search, coordinate grounding, navaids, and the country/region lookup table:

| Tool | Description |
|:---|:---|
| `ourairports_search_airports` | Full-text and faceted search over the airport corpus by name, municipality, country, region, or type. Ranked summaries, closed airports excluded by default. |
| `ourairports_search_runways` | Search runways across all airports by surface, length, width, and lighting, joined back to their airports and filtered by country, region, or airport type. One flat `{ airport, runway }` row per matching runway. |
| `ourairports_get_airport` | Full record for one airport resolved by any code (IATA/ICAO/GPS/local/ident), with its runways and radio frequencies inline. |
| `ourairports_find_airports` | Airports within a radius of a coordinate, ranked nearest-first by great-circle distance, with distance and bearing. |
| `ourairports_find_navaids` | Navigation aids (VOR, VOR-DME, DME, NDB, NDB-DME, TACAN, VORTAC) near a coordinate or serving a specific airport. |
| `ourairports_list_countries` | Countries present in the dataset with ISO codes and airport counts; optional continent filter and nested regions. The lookup table for valid `country`/`region` filter values. |

### `ourairports_search_airports`

The common entry point — search by free text, facets, or both.

- Free-text search over name, municipality, and keywords; tokens are AND-matched (word order and partial words handled)
- Faceted filters: `country` (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2), `region` (ISO 3166-2), and `type` — `country`/`region` are exact match, case-insensitive, with surrounding whitespace ignored
- Closed airports excluded by default; opt in with `include_closed`
- Results ranked operational/larger-airports-first, each with its full code set and coordinates for chaining into `ourairports_get_airport`
- Truncation disclosure — total matched count, applied cap, and guidance to broaden or narrow

---

### `ourairports_search_runways`

Cross-airport runway search — the counterpart to `ourairports_get_airport`, which lists runways for one already-known airport.

- Airport facets (`country`, `region`, `type`) narrow the airports first; runway facets (`surface`, `min_length_ft`, `min_width_ft`, `lighted`) then filter their runways
- `surface` is a case-insensitive substring match against the raw upstream surface string (no controlled vocabulary — a shorter fragment like `asp` matches ASP, ASPH, and Asphalt), not an exact code
- Returns one flat `{ airport, runway }` row per matching runway — an airport with three matching runways contributes three rows
- A runway whose length or width is unknown is excluded when the matching `min_*_ft` filter is set — never assumed to meet a threshold the data can't confirm
- Closed airports and closed runways are both excluded unless `include_closed_airports` / `include_closed_runways` is set
- Truncation disclosure — total matched count, applied cap, and guidance to broaden or narrow

---

### `ourairports_get_airport`

The detail tool — one call returns everything the common case needs.

- Resolves a single `code` case-insensitively across all five identifier spaces (priority: ident → ICAO → IATA → GPS → local); surrounding whitespace is ignored
- Runways and radio frequencies inline; `include` trims the response to a subset, and the output's `included` field distinguishes a relation omitted by `include` from one that genuinely has no records
- Echoes the airport's complete code set plus a `resolvedVia` / `resolutionNote`, with an ambiguity warning for shared national codes so a wrong resolution is self-correcting
- Absent codes reported as `null`; closed airports always resolve
- `unknown_code` error with a recovery hint when no identifier space matches

---

### `ourairports_find_airports`

The grounding tool — turn a latitude/longitude into the nearest airport(s).

- Great-circle (haversine) ranking, nearest-first, each result with `distanceKm` and `bearingDeg` (degrees true) from the query point
- `radius_km` (1–500, default 100), optional `type` filter, `include_closed` opt-in
- Coordinate in, ranked airports out — no geocoding; resolve place names to lat/lon upstream first
- Empty-radius guidance suggesting a wider `radius_km`

---

### `ourairports_find_navaids`

Navigation aids two ways — spatially or by airport.

- **Coordinate mode:** `latitude` + `longitude` (+ optional `radius_km`) ranks navaids nearest-first with distance and bearing
- **Airport mode:** `airport_code` returns the navaids serving that airport
- Exactly one mode required — supplying both or neither is a validation error
- Frequencies surfaced in both kHz (the stored value — a VOR on 114.5 MHz reads `frequencyKhz` 114500) and MHz
- Airport mode distinguishes "airport not found" (`unknown_code` error) from "airport found but has no associated navaids" (empty list with a note)

---

## Resource and prompt

| Type | Name | Description |
|:---|:---|:---|
| Resource | `airport://{code}` | Single airport record by any code (IATA/ICAO/GPS/local/ident), with runways and frequencies inline. |

The `airport://{code}` resource is a stable-URI twin of `ourairports_get_airport` for clients that inject resource context. All data is reachable from the tools alone — tool-only clients lose nothing. The corpus is not exposed as a resource list (enumerating 85k airports is a dump, not a discovery aid); discovery is `ourairports_search_airports`.

## Features

Built on [`@cyanheads/mcp-ts-c