Find Nearest Airport

Locate the 25 nearest airports from any city, ZIP code, address, or GPS position. IATA and ICAO codes, distance, compass bearing, and aerodrome type — worldwide, free, no sign-up. Sourced from OpenStreetMap via the public Overpass API; haversine distance computed in the browser.

What this tool does

The Find Nearest Airport tool returns the airports closest to any starting location, sorted by straight-line distance ascending. The starting point is whatever you choose — a typed address, a search-bar suggestion, your phone's GPS, or a click on the world map. The tool draws a radius around that point, queries OpenStreetMap for every aerodrome inside the radius, and renders the top 25 in a sortable table.

Most online "airport near me" tools are run by airlines or booking aggregators and only return airports they happen to sell tickets for. That gives you a partial picture — the nearest small regional field might offer dramatically cheaper flights via a low-cost carrier the aggregator does not partner with. This tool returns the geographic answer: every aerodrome in the radius, regardless of whether it is a commercial international gateway, a budget secondary airport, a regional commuter field, a general-aviation strip, or a small towered private airfield. You can then take that list to your aggregator of choice and check fares.

The tool also includes the bits of metadata professional travellers and pilots actually need — the IATA code (so you can paste it into a fare aggregator), the ICAO code (so a pilot can look it up in a flight-planning system), the compass bearing (so you can answer "which direction is it from here"), and the aerodrome type (commercial vs general aviation).

How to use the tool

Five steps from blank canvas to a sortable, exportable airport list.

1. Set the search origin. Type a city, neighbourhood, ZIP code, or specific address into the search box and pick a result. The Photon autocomplete is typo-tolerant, so partial matches like "manhatan" still resolve. Alternatively, tap the "Use My Location" button to seed with your phone's GPS, click anywhere on the map to drop an origin pin, or pick one of the quick-example chips ("Manhattan, NYC", "Downtown LA", "Central London", "Tokyo Skytree", or "Aspen, Colorado") to load a working example. The chosen origin becomes a red pin on the map and the centre of the radius search.
2. Adjust the search radius. Use the slider to set the radius from 1 km up to 200 km. Smaller radii (10–25 km) work well in dense metro areas where the question is "which airport is in my city right now"; larger radii (100–200 km) make sense in regional or rural areas where the next viable commercial airport may be a 90-minute drive. The slider is debounced 300 ms so dragging the handle does not hammer the upstream Overpass API. Toggle the unit between kilometres and miles — the slider keeps the same underlying value; only the label changes.
3. Read the results table. The tool returns up to 25 airports sorted by straight-line distance ascending. Each row shows the airport name, IATA code (the 3-letter passenger code like JFK), ICAO code (the 4-letter code used by ATC and pilots), distance in kilometres or miles, compass bearing in degrees, and aerodrome type (commercial vs general aviation). Click any column header to sort by that field — handy for sorting alphabetically by name or by IATA code if you want to spot specific airports quickly.
4. Click a row or pin to focus the map. Click a row in the results table or the numbered pin on the map and the tool highlights the airport, scrolls it into view, and flies the map to the location at zoom 10. Useful when comparing a couple of close-by candidates — JFK vs LGA, or LAX vs Burbank vs Long Beach — and you want to see the runway orientation and surrounding road network for each.
5. Export to CSV or share the link. Click "Export CSV" to download the full result set with name, lat/lng, distance in both km and mi, bearing, compass direction, IATA, ICAO, and aerodrome type. Click "Copy share link" to get a URL that re-opens the same origin and radius — the state is encoded into the URL hash, so anyone with the link sees the exact same search. Useful for sending colleagues a list of "airports near our new office" without re-typing the address.

What people use the airport finder for

Seven common patterns we see in support requests and search analytics. Every pattern starts with the same question — “what airports are near here?” — and the tool is designed to answer it cleanly without forcing you to log in or watch ads first.

Worked example — airports near Manhattan, NYC

Search “Manhattan, NYC” with a 100 km radius. The tool returns this airport list (rounded to one decimal). Notice that the closest airport is not always the one you expect — LaGuardia (LGA) wins by 10 km over JFK, but the “business airport” (TEB Teterboro, on the New Jersey side of the Hudson) is closer than JFK to Manhattan. Newark (EWR) is geographically closer to lower Manhattan than JFK; commuters from Brooklyn often use JFK because of subway access despite EWR being objectively nearer to Wall Street.

Click the “Manhattan, NYC” quick-example chip in the tool above to load this exact origin and see the live results — the numbers will match within rounding error (OpenStreetMap occasionally moves an aerodrome point by a few hundred metres after a terminal renumbering). The “Stewart, NY” result (SWF) at 99.7 km is the boundary case — at the 100 km radius it is borderline; nudge to 110 km and Stewart is firmly inside.

How airports are classified

The tool tells you whether each result is a commercial airport or a general-aviation field via the “Type” column. The taxonomy below is the FAA / ICAO-aligned scheme used by airport planners and travel professionals worldwide. The same hub-size ranking is used by the FAA to allocate Airport Improvement Program (AIP) funding.

IATA vs ICAO codes — quick reference

IATA codes (3 letters) are the codes you see on boarding passes — JFK, LAX, LHR. ICAO codes (4 letters) are the codes pilots and air traffic control use. The first letter or two of the ICAO code identifies the country: K for the continental US (KJFK, KLAX), C for Canada (CYYZ, CYUL), EG for the United Kingdom (EGLL, EGLC), LF for France (LFPG, LFBO), RJ for Japan (RJTT, RJAA), YS for Australia (YSSY, YBBN). For US airports, the ICAO is usually just K + IATA. For international airports, the IATA and ICAO bodies can differ noticeably (Heathrow is LHR / EGLL).

How the tool works

1. Query — Overpass + OpenStreetMap

Every search fires a single Overpass query against the public overpass-api.de instance, filtering for nodes and ways tagged aeroway=aerodrome within the chosen radius. We use out center tags 50 to get the centre coordinate and full tag set for both nodes and ways (way centroids matter because larger airports — JFK, LHR, FRA — are mapped as polygons, not points). The query is wrapped by our /api/overpassproxy, which adds a User-Agent string and a 15 s abort timeout, and gracefully degrades to a “service unavailable” response on any upstream failure.

2. Distance and bearing — haversine, in the browser

For each returned aerodrome, the server computes the great-circle distance from your origin using the haversine formula on a spherical Earth (R = 6,371 km, the IUGG mean radius). Forward bearing comes from the standard atan2 form of the great-circle bearing formula. Both are computed once per query and rounded to one decimal (km) and the nearest degree (bearing); 16-point compass labels are derived client-side. The math is identical to what professional GIS systems use for “distance to point” queries.

3. IATA / ICAO extraction — direct from OSM tags

Each aerodrome in OSM has a free-form tags object. We extract iata and icao directly when present, and the aerodrome:type tag for the type column (falling back to a commercial / general heuristic based on whether an IATA code is present, since commercial-service airports almost always have one). The name:en tag is preferred when available so users see English airport names even in regions where the local-language name dominates.

4. Cap at 25 + sort by distance

The query backend asks Overpass for up to 50 elements per query (more than enough for any realistic radius), and we cap the response at the top 25 by distance ascending. Even in the densest aviation regions (around London, the New York metro, the Tokyo metro) the cap rarely fires — there are about 10–15 aerodromes within 100 km of any major city, including small GA fields. The cap exists mostly to keep the table readable on a phone.

How this tool compares to alternatives

Quick comparison against common airport-finder tools and aggregators. We are deliberately focused on the “list-the-airports-in-a-radius” problem — booking and routing are out of scope.

Related tools and resources

For a different proximity question — “what is within X km of here” for any kind of place rather than just airports — see our find cities in radius tool (US cities, sortable by population), or find ZIP codes in radius (every US ZIP centroid). For finding the nearest EV charging station, the sister tool runs the same Overpass-backed search for charging-station POIs with operator, socket type, and max kW columns.

Once you have the airport short-list, the next questions are usually distance and travel time. Distance between cities gives you a clean haversine number for any two cities, crow flies distance compares straight-line vs driving distance with a detour percentage, and drive time map shows the isochrone — every neighbourhood within a chosen drive time of the airport (handy for “can a customer reach the airport in 30 minutes from here?”). For a clean compass bearing alone, bearing calculator gives the four-flavour answer (initial, final, rhumb-line, magnetic).

For the inverse question — “what county or city is this airport in?” — try coordinates to address (paste the airport lat/lng) or what county am I in (US-only). The IATA code itself is enough for any aviation database; OurAirports.com is the canonical free dataset for airport metadata beyond what OSM has, and AOPA / AirNav are the standards for FBO and runway data at GA fields.

Frequently asked questions

More distance and lookup tools