Fight Aware announced at NBAA 2022 the opening of their legacy database for analysis. Their announcement at a press conference is shown in the video below.
The use of big data in aviation is not new, but being able to analyze large datasets has historically been difficult. Â For the last 17 years, Flight Aware has been collecting a series of data points on each flight to track it from origin to destination. Â Flight Aware has a series of ADSB recorders located around the world that collect real-time data on all aircraft in flight. Â Those aircraft include commercial, business, and general aviation aircraft flying nearly anywhere in the world. Â That provides them with a very large database that is currently more than 5 petabytes in size, covering more than 700 million flights. Â Every day that database grows with on average another 142,000 flights. Â Finding your way through the data records that summarize these flights and provide details down to the flight track utilized, is a difficult process without knowledge of how to extract it.
Flight Aware is now making their Application Program Interface, or API, Â available to developers to access its historical data for comparisons and analytical purposes. Â They are also offering standard ways to query the database and integrate with a number of analytical tools so that their subscribers can extract and compare historical data and trends.
Their API is now available on a subscription basis, with fees based on the amount of data extracted. Â This can open up entirely new ways to track and analyze data, whether by aircraft type, airline, time of day, airport, or other characteristics. Â The tool should provide a valuable historic resource for benchmarking and analytics for aviation analysts.
