Can you tell me more about FlightStats data sources?

Cirium aggregates schedules, airline, airport, and positional data from over 600 sources to produce its industry leading Flight Status information services.  From these numerous sources, we handle over 50 million pieces of flight data each day.  Using our internal processes we validate, normalize and apply changes to our Flight Status database resulting in millions of flight status and positional updates.

Published Schedule Data
Published Airline Schedules is the first ingredient in building flight status.  We ingest a daily schedule file produced by the Cirium team and normalize the data.  Data elements include routing, scheduled block times, codeshares, equipment type, flight type (cargo / passenger), and traffic restrictions.  Using this data we create upcoming flights in our database to which we update with operational data.

Airline and Airport Data
Through direct connections, feeds and reservation systems, Cirium receives the operational data reported by airlines on their flights.  Data elements obtained include estimated and actual block times, status, and gate assignments. We process information from numerous protocols and formats including HTTP, FTP, Web Services, and MQ Series.   

Positional Data
We rely on information streams to obtain positional / tracking data through data partnerships.  Collectively, the data from these providers allow us to track the flight plan, latitude, longitude, altitude, and speed of many of the world’s flights.   

Reference Data
We maintain reference tables of airlines, airports, timezones, and equipment.  Each incoming piece of information is checked against these tables.  Where necessary we maintain distinct mapping / translation rules for a given data source.

The end result of our efforts is a comprehensive database of Flight Status information. Cirium consistently obtains 92.54% coverage of top 250 carriers globally, and we’re actively pursuing relationships to increase coverage. Flight Status records exist for each flight containing the published data, current airline reported information and positional data.  We make these records available in a variety of products including APIs, Alerting Services, Data Feeds, Data Exports and FlightStats.com.

Learn more: Data Innovation