FlightStatus

Data

Where the data comes from

FlightStatus is built on open sources. Each answers part of the question, and none of them answers all of it.

Live aircraft positions

adsb.lol — a community network of volunteer ADS-B receivers. Every position FlightStatus shows was genuinely heard by one of them, which is why the age of the reading is always displayed beside it, and why a position is sometimes simply unavailable.

Routes and aircraft

adsbdb — an open database mapping callsigns to the airports they fly between. It is what turns EK202 into New York JFK to Dubai DXB without a commercial provider.

Airports and airlines

OurAirports (public domain) and OpenFlights (Open Database Licence). Compiled once at build time into a table shipped with the app, so turning DUB into Dublin Airport never costs a request. Timezones come from a polygon lookup done at build time, because an arrival time in the wrong zone is worse than no arrival time.

The globe

Natural Earth (public domain) coastlines, simplified to 19 KB. No paid map tiles, and nothing fetched while you look at it.

What no open source provides

  • Scheduled departure and arrival times.
  • Terminals and gates.
  • Baggage belts.
  • Delays measured against a schedule.
  • Cancellations and diversions as declared by the airline.

FlightStatus is built so a commercial provider can be added later behind the same interface, filling those in without the pages changing. Until then it names each missing field and says why.

Please treat the open networks kindly. FlightStatus caches aggressively, coalesces concurrent requests, rate-limits by address and stops polling the moment a tab is hidden, so that one look at a flight costs one look upstream.