Crowdsourced air traffic data from the OpenSky Network 2019–2020

Abstract

The OpenSky Network is a non-profit association that crowdsources the global collection of live air traffic control data broadcast by aircraft and makes them available to researchers. OpenSky's data have been used by over 100 academic groups in the past 5 years, with popular research applications ranging from improved weather forecasting to climate analysis. With the COVID-19 outbreak, the demand for live and historic aircraft flight data has surged. Researchers around the world use air traffic data to comprehend the spread of the pandemic and analyse the effects of the global containment measures on economies, climate and other systems. With this work, we present a comprehensive air traffic dataset, derived and enriched from the full OpenSky data and made publicly available for the first time (Olive et al., 2020; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3931948, last access: 9 February 2021). It spans all flights seen by the network's more than 3500 members between 1 January 2019 and 1 July 2020. The archive is being updated every month and for the first 18 months includes 41 900 660 flights, from 160 737 aircraft, which were seen to frequent 13 934 airports in 127 countries.