Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 CAA Registry

Name	lk-caa-registry
Country	Sri Lanka
Registration prefix	4R-
Data source	https://www.caa.lk/en/downloads/sl-aircraft-register
Format	PDF (URL discovered by scraping the index page for the register link)
Run frequency	Weekly (Monday, 13:10 UTC)
Depends on Mictronics for ICAO hex	Yes — this runner does not publish ICAO hex addresses; registrations are resolved via RediSearch against Mictronics records (idx:aircraft:mictronics). Must run after the mictronics runner.

How it works

The Sri Lanka CAA downloads index page is scraped for an anchor tag whose href ends in .pdf and whose link text contains "Civil Aircraft Registered", which is followed to download the current register PDF. The PDF's path and filename are both date-encoded (e.g. 2026_March/1_Civil_aircraft_registered_in_sri_lanka_as_at_11032026.pdf) and change on every republish, so matching by link text rather than URL pattern is what survives the source's own churn. TLS verification is disabled — the server serves only its leaf certificate, without the intermediate needed to build a trust chain from a standard root store, so every compliant TLS client fails to verify it as-is (same situation as cy-dca-registry/hu-kozhaf-registry/rs-cad-registry).

Each page is parsed with pdfplumber's built-in table extraction (extract_table()). A handful of "Hot Air Balloon" entries have a two-line Make cell (e.g. CAMERON - Hot Air\nBalloon); pdfplumber's table extraction splits the wrapped second line into its own otherwise-empty row (Ref.No, Model No., Registration, Operator all blank). These are filtered out by requiring a non-empty, pattern-matching Registration cell — they are a table-extraction artifact, not additional aircraft. A few registration marks also carry a stray space after the hyphen in the source PDF (e.g. 4R- MDA); internal whitespace is stripped from the registration value before it's regex-validated. Every written record explicitly sets military: false — this register is exclusively civil, and the explicit value ensures a stale military: true flag (from Mictronics or a prior record on a reused hex) is corrected on re-registration.

Columns

Source column	Imported	Notes
Ref.No	❌	Parsed but not stored (sequence number)
Make	✅	→ aircraft.manufacturer
Model No.	✅	→ aircraft.model
Registration	✅	4R--prefixed → used as the Mictronics lookup key
Operator	✅	→ registrant.names[0] — this register has no distinct owner column, only the operator, so that name fills the registrant-identity role directly, the same approach jo-carc-registry/tt-caa-registry take for their own operator-only sources

No serial number or registration date columns exist in this source.

See specs/data-dictionary.yaml (lk-caa-registry entry) for full column semantics and cross-source schema notes.

Example Output

Read back the merged record for a given ICAO hex (combines this runner's data with Mictronics and any other sources that have written to the same key):

docker run --rm --network host redis:latest redis-cli EVAL "$(cat ./shared/lua/merge_aircraft.lua)" 0 780A6B | python3 -m json.tool --sort-keys --no-ensure-ascii

{
    "aircraft": {
        "manufacturer": "AIRBUS",
        "manufacturer_model": "AIRBUS A320-232",
        "model": "A320-232",
        "type_designator": "A320"
    },
    "data_sources": [
        "mictronics",
        "lk-caa-registry"
    ],
    "icao_hex": "780A6B",
    "military": false,
    "registrant": {
        "names": [
            "SriLankan Airlines Ltd."
        ]
    },
    "registration": "4R-ABL"
}

Configuration

See Data Runners for the full list of environment variables every runner reads. This runner writes aircraft:registry:{icao_hex} with a fixed 14-day TTL (ENRICHMENT_TTL_SECONDS in shared/timing.py).

MQTT

Published once, at the end of a run, to SkyFollower/runner/lk-caa-registry/statistic/{name} (all retained):

Topic suffix	Value	Format
records_imported	e.g. 83	Integer as string
last_run_at	e.g. 2026-08-09T14:32:01.123456+00:00	ISO 8601 UTC
last_run_status	Success or Failure	String

Home Assistant autodiscovery configs are also published (retained) to homeassistant/sensor/SkyFollower_runner_lk_caa_registry_{name}/config for each of the three stats above.