Reference · built on requestCommons signalAviation & marine

OpenSky Network

Live aircraft state vectors, flights by aircraft or airport, and tracks from the OpenSky Network's REST API, on a daily credit budget.

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About

The OpenSky Network is a non-profit association in Burgdorf, Switzerland, that collects aircraft surveillance data from volunteer receivers. Its REST API at opensky-network.org/api serves state vectors for all aircraft or a bounding box, flights in a time interval, by aircraft, or by airport arrival and departure, and an experimental track endpoint. Each state vector carries icao24, callsign, origin_country, position, barometric and geometric altitude, velocity, true_track, vertical_rate, squawk, a position_source of ADS-B, ASTERIX, MLAT, or FLARM, and an aircraft category. Authentication is OAuth2 client credentials; anonymous calls get 400 credits a day.

Through Fibric, an operator watches arrivals at the airports your guests or freight come through, or aircraft over your sites, and proposes a shuttle re-time, an arrival prep task, or a noise response for your approval.

This is a reference listing. It documents what Fibric would read from OpenSky Network and what it could propose, based on the publisher's published interfaces. Fibric builds it under a managed deployment when you request it; selecting it here installs nothing.

Inputs

  • State vectors from GET /states/all for all aircraft, a set of icao24 addresses, or a lamin, lomin, lamax, lomax bounding box, with extended=1 for category
  • Per-vector fields: icao24, callsign, origin_country, time_position, last_contact, longitude, latitude, baro_altitude, on_ground, velocity, true_track, vertical_rate, geo_altitude, squawk, spi, position_source
  • Flights from GET /flights/all for a begin and end interval, and GET /flights/aircraft by icao24
  • Arrivals and departures per ICAO airport from GET /flights/arrival and GET /flights/departure
  • Trajectories from GET /tracks with a waypoint at least every 15 minutes in flight, on track changes over 2.5°, and altitude changes over 100m
  • Your own receivers' state vectors from GET /states/own without credit cost, with a serials filter

Proposed actions

Read-only. This feed informs operators; it changes nothing.

Proposed actions are target capabilities. Every action runs propose-first and needs a validated deployment and the appropriate permissions.

What you can build

  • Re-time the hotel shuttle to the aircraft, not the timetable

    The operator polls /flights/arrival for your airport and the state vector of a guest's inbound aircraft, then proposes a shuttle departure that matches the actual landing.

    With Shuttle Timing

  • Start arrival prep when the flight is on final

    Given a guest's flight callsign, the operator watches its state vector inside a box around the airport and proposes the room-ready and greeting tasks as it descends.

    With Arrival Prep

  • Log the aircraft behind a noise complaint

    When a complaint arrives, the operator reads state vectors over your property for that minute and proposes a response that names the icao24, altitude, and true track observed.

    With Noise Response

Requirements

  • An OpenSky account and API client for anything beyond anonymous access; basic authentication with username and password is no longer accepted
  • A written license from OpenSky Network for commercial or for-profit use, and for operational REST API use in any live product or automated system
  • A credit budget: /states/all costs 1 to 4 credits by bounding box area; flights and tracks cost 4 under 24 hours, rising across day partitions
  • Handling for 429 with X-Rate-Limit-Retry-After-Seconds when credits run out, and for 404 when a flights query finds nothing
Authentication
OAuth2 client credentials only. Create an API client on your OpenSky account page, exchange client_id and client_secret for a Bearer token at the auth.opensky-network.org token endpoint; tokens expire after 30 minutes.

Limits

  • Anonymous access: only the most recent state vectors, 10-second resolution, and 400 credits a day per endpoint group; standard users get 4,000, active feeders 8,000
  • State vectors reach back 1 hour for authenticated users; /flights/all spans at most two hours, and the aircraft and airport flight endpoints two days
  • Flights, arrivals, and departures are updated by a batch process at night, so only the previous day or earlier is available
  • The tracks endpoint is experimental, can be out of order at any time, and holds no tracks older than 30 days

Access and pricing

Reference listing. Public feed access is separate from Fibric integration. If you request this feed, your quote covers the build, usage, and support.

Request OpenSky Network ↗

Questions and answers

Can you use the OpenSky REST API in a product?
Only with a written license. OpenSky's terms grant use for non-profit research and education; any commercial or for-profit use, and operational use of the REST API in any live product, service, or automated system, requires a prior written agreement with OpenSky Network.
How do credits work?
Credits sit in three independent buckets for /states/*, /tracks/*, and /flights/*. Anonymous users get 400 a day, standard users 4,000, active feeders 8,000, and licensed users 14,400 an hour. A /states/all call costs 1 credit up to 25 square degrees and 4 for a global query.
How fresh is the data?
State vectors are current: anonymous users see the most recent vectors at 10-second resolution, authenticated users 5-second resolution up to an hour back. Flights, arrivals, and departures come from a nightly batch, so they cover the previous day or earlier.
Ask about OpenSky Network

Ask about the capabilities and requirements in this listing.

For project-specific requirements, contact Fibric.

This Commons signal listing is developed, published, and supported by Fibric. It reads public data published by The OpenSky Network (opensky-network.org). Upstream agencies and projects are the property of their respective owners, who are not affiliated with Fibric and do not sponsor or endorse this listing. Trademark policy