FlightAware Adds Historical Flight Data

This flowchart from the FlightAware presentation at NBAA-BACE illustrates how the company collects, interprets, enriches and delivers "big data" to its customers.
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Key Takeaways:

  • FlightAware's AeroAPI has expanded to offer access to historical flight data, dating back to January 1, 2011.
  • This new functionality complements existing real-time and future flight information, providing details like past flight status, times, and tracks.
  • The historical data, accessed via various identifiers, is derived from FlightAware's proprietary algorithms and fusion of thousands of data sources, serving as a "single source of truth" for operational decision-making and predictive analysis.
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Through its AeroAPI utility, FlightAware expanded the functionality of the query-based flight tracking to offer customers access to historical flight data dating back to Jan. 1, 2011. FlightAware users can already retrieve on-demand real-time flight status updates, flight tracks, future flight schedules and other flight data specific to any airport, airline fleet, flight or tail number. The new program update allows them to access historical data to include flight status and times, flight tracks and static track images for any flight or tail number.

The historical data can be accessed by the flight identifier (including IATA/ICAO identifier), registration number or codeshare identifiers. At NBAA-BACE 2022 in Orlando, FlightAware explained that using proprietary algorithms based on years of experience, it fuses data from thousands of sources to provide a single source of “truth” that might be useful for operational decision-making and/or software developers exploring predictive flight patterns, for example. Over the years, FlightAware has collected data on more than 700 million flights.

Larry Anglisano

Larry Anglisano is the former Editor in Chief of sister publication Aviation Consumer magazine. He's an active land, sea and glider pilot, and has over 30 years experience as an avionics tech.
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