Wikipedia Airports

Use Wikipedia as a route discovery and sanity-check source for airport destinations. This is especially useful when:

• an airport page has an Airlines and destinations section
• an airline's own city-pair marketing pages confirm service patterns
• flight search tools disagree about whether a route exists

Wikipedia is not a booking source and not a real-time schedule source. Use it to discover likely routes, then confirm them with airline or fare tools.

Best Use Cases

• "What destinations does SAN serve?"
• "Does Southwest fly SAN -> EUG?"
• "What airports can I use for a late split return?"
• "Which airline serves this small airport nonstop?"

Workflow

1. Resolve the airport page from an IATA code

Use Wikipedia search with the airport code plus the word airport.

curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=search&srsearch=SAN+airport&format=json" \
  | jq '.query.search[0:5][] | {title}'

Usually the first result is the airport page, e.g. San Diego International Airport.

2. Fetch the page

Use the readable page HTML or the wikitext parse API.

curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=San_Diego_International_Airport&prop=wikitext&formatversion=2&format=json" \
  | jq -r '.parse.wikitext'

Or fetch the rendered page:

curl -Ls "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_International_Airport"

3. Look for route sections

Search for headings like:

• Airlines and destinations
• Destinations
• Passenger
• Airlines

Example:

curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=parse&page=San_Diego_International_Airport&prop=wikitext&formatversion=2&format=json" \
  | jq -r '.parse.wikitext' \
  | rg -n "Airlines and destinations|Destinations|Passenger|Southwest|Eugene|Portland"

4. Treat airline city-pair pages as a second source

If the airport page is incomplete, use airline route pages to validate the pattern.