OpenSky Network Data

The OpenSky Network provides multiple ways to access its rich air traffic datasets, ranging from real-time APIs to historical archives and curated scientific datasets. Whether you're looking for structured SQL-based queries, programmatic API access, or preprocessed datasets for research, these tools offer powerful insights into global air traffic patterns. Explore the options below to find the best method for your needs.

Besides our public API, we provide free access to our full dataset through an SQL-like query interface using Trino and Minio. This service is available to university-affiliated researchers, governmental organizations, and aviation authorities for aviation-related research and incident investigations. Private or commercial entities must contact us for a license.

Access Trino

Explore our REST API documentation and interact with real-time air traffic data. The OpenSky API provides structured access to live and historical aircraft position data, making it a powerful tool for aviation researchers and developers.

Explore API Docs

Publicly available datasets derived from OpenSky data. These datasets have been created using our Trino historical data interface and live API.

Available Datasets:
  • Weekly 24 Hours of State Vector Data
  • OpenSky Raw Data
  • The LocaRDS Dataset
  • The COVID-19 Flight Dataset
  • OpenSky's Aircraft Metadata Database
  • Reference Datasets for In-Flight Emergency Situations
  • Climbing Aircraft Dataset
  • Database for World Aircraft's Common GICB Capabilities
  • The OpenSky ADS-C Dataset
View Scientific Datasets

The OpenSky community provides various tools for accessing and processing air traffic data. These tools include Python, R, and MATLAB libraries for querying the Trino database, interacting with the API, and analyzing prepared datasets.

Available Data Tools:
  • Traffic - Python Air Traffic Data Processing
  • pyModeS + pyOpenSky
  • em-download-opensky + em-processing-opensky
  • R-based Wrappers (openSkies, osn, openskyr)
  • ADSbDataParser
  • Stone Soup
  • Other Wrappers (C#, Typescript, Perl, Go, Rust)
Explore Data Tools

Besides tracking data, it is necessary for most research to have metadata about the tracked aircraft. OpenSky's aircraft database aggregates official and unofficial sources in order to provide this metadata. The database as a whole can be downloaded in .csv format. We have a number of monthly snapshots so the metadata is preserved how it was in a particular month. Currently, the database is only updated irregularly, we will bring it fully back in the future.

Explore the Aircraft Database

OpenSky provides real-time and historical aircraft alerts, allowing you to monitor emergency squawks, loss of signal events, and other notable flight anomalies. These alerts are generated based on and Mode S messages received from the network.

Use the alerts system to track specific events of interest, such as emergency transponder codes (e.g., 7700 for general emergencies), communication loss, and other significant occurrences in global airspace.

View Alerts

The **COVID-19 Flight Dataset** captures the impact of the pandemic on global air traffic. Derived from OpenSky's full dataset, it provides cleaned and enriched data on flights observed by more than 5500 receivers since January 2019. The dataset was maintained until December 2022, offering researchers a unique opportunity to analyze aviation trends during one of the most disruptive periods in modern history.

Explore the COVID-19 Dataset