Over the past couple of years, I got involved in various research projects related to COVID-19 where we needed to analyze human mobility data in different scales and transport modes. Quite often, we used data from Brazil’s Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) to get information on international flights to and from Brazil as well as domestic flights within the country.

We have used these data in three papers ( 1, 2 and 3) that touched on issues related to the role of human mobility in the spread of COVID-19. In a more recent study, we used flight data to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on air passenger demand and CO2 emissions in Brazil.

After using these data quite a few times, I decided to create flightsbr, an R package to make it easy for anyone to download flight and airport data from Brazil’s Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC). The data includes detailed information on all aircrafts, aerodromes, airports, and airport movements registered in ANAC, and on every international flight to and from Brazil, as well as domestic flights within the country. You may install flightsbr from CRAN or the dev version from Github.

The package currently includes the four main functions below. These functions are kind of self-explanatory. In any case, I would strongly encourage users to check the package documentation and vignettes in the flightsbr website.

1. read_flights()
2. read_airports()
3. read_aircrafts()
4. read_airport_movements()