Almost every kind of aviation data is available by API now — positions, weather, schedules — but aerodrome charts remain stubbornly hard to get programmatically. If you've tried, you know the drill: Jeppesen sends you to enterprise sales, and the free alternative is scraping dozens of national AIP sites, each with its own format and login. That gap is exactly why a charts API is worth knowing about. Here's how to pull approach plates, airport diagrams, and departure/arrival procedures for an airport with a single call.
What aerodrome charts are
Charts (or "plates") are the standardized diagrams a crew uses to fly into and out of an airport. They come in a handful of categories, and any charts API worth using returns them categorized rather than as an undifferentiated pile:
| Code | Content |
|---|---|
GEN | Airport diagram and general information |
GND | Ground movement and taxi charts |
SID | Standard instrument departures |
STAR | Standard terminal arrivals |
APP | Approach procedures (ILS, RNAV, VOR, etc.) |
If you're building the cockpit app that displays these, our guide to reading an airport diagram breaks down what the GEN/GND plates actually show.
Fetching charts for an airport
The core call takes an ICAO code and returns categorized PDF links. SkyLink API's charts endpoint selects the correct national source automatically from the ICAO prefix — no source override needed:
curl "https://skylink-api.p.rapidapi.com/charts/KJFK" \
-H "X-RapidAPI-Key: $RAPIDAPI_KEY" \
-H "X-RapidAPI-Host: skylink-api.p.rapidapi.com"{
"icao_code": "KJFK",
"source": "faa",
"charts": {
"GND": [
{ "name": "KJFK - Airport Diagram", "url": "https://...", "category": "GND" }
],
"SID": [
{ "name": "KENNEDY TWO", "url": "https://...", "category": "SID" }
]
},
"total_count": 42,
"fetched_at": "2026-02-11T12:00:00Z"
}Each entry is a named link to the actual chart PDF, grouped under its category. When you only need one plate type — say approaches for an arrival panel — request a single category instead of the whole index:
curl "https://skylink-api.p.rapidapi.com/charts/EGLL/APP" \
-H "X-RapidAPI-Key: $RAPIDAPI_KEY" \
-H "X-RapidAPI-Host: skylink-api.p.rapidapi.com"A category with no published charts comes back as an empty array rather than an error, so your UI can render "no approaches published" cleanly.
Checking coverage first
Chart availability is national, so call GET /charts/sources once at startup to see which regions and ICAO prefixes are covered and populate a source picker or validate an airport before fetching:
curl "https://skylink-api.p.rapidapi.com/charts/sources" \
-H "X-RapidAPI-Key: $RAPIDAPI_KEY" \
-H "X-RapidAPI-Host: skylink-api.p.rapidapi.com"SkyLink API's charts cover 91 countries and territories. One integration detail worth planning for: some national chart hosts are slow, so allow a longer read timeout (30–60 seconds) on the charts call than you would for, say, weather.
Why this is the hard one to find
It's worth being clear about the landscape, because it's unusual: almost nobody offers aerodrome charts as a clean, self-serve API. The incumbents (Jeppesen, Lido) are enterprise products with sales cycles and licensing built for airlines. The free path is stitching together national AIPs yourself — dozens of sources, formats, and update schedules. A single endpoint that normalizes 91 countries into one categorized response is a genuine shortcut, which is why charts are usually the piece that pushes EFB and flight-planning builders toward an aggregating API in the first place.
If you're assembling a full electronic flight bag, charts are one feature among several — What Is an EFB? maps every cockpit-app feature to its data source, and the airport database API supplies the runways and frequencies that go alongside the plates.
SkyLink API gives you a free tier of 1,000 requests/month across charts and airport data, with paid plans starting at $18.59/mo for production. It's available through the free trial — sign up, grab a key, and put real approach plates in your app without a sales call.