ADS-B Exchange not only delivers real-time data through our Enterprise API but also maintains an extensive archive of historical flight data. Since March 2020, we have captured aircraft positions and all related ADS-B/MLAT/Mode S parameters worldwide at five-second intervals.
Our archival approach offers two distinct layers of information. Firstly, a comprehensive overview of all aircraft in the airspace, and secondly, a more granular “one file per aircraft, per day” format that enables in-depth trajectory and parameter analysis. This meticulous level of detail proves invaluable for historical flight path studies, accident investigations, and Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) analytics. Renowned investigative agencies worldwide have leveraged our data archives for their critical research.
This rich data repository serves as an asset for a wide variety of applications and use cases. For those interested in sampling the data, we offer free access to the first-of-the-month data sets for testing and evaluation purposes. Please see below for links to sample data.
Sample Data
Samples of the data ADS-B Exchange collects are available for evaluation. Complete data from the 1st of each month are made available free of charge.
For commercial agreements, it is possible to push all data to customer-owned cloud storage data buckets (AWS/S3, Azure, etc.) on a daily or more frequent basis for import/analysis by your own tools.
Optionally, you may pull the data from our buckets.
Available Aircraft Data
- “readsb-hist” – Snapshots of all global airborne traffic are archived every 5 seconds starting May 2020, (prior data is available every 60 secs from starting in July 2016). https://samples.adsbexchange.com/readsb-hist/yyyy/mm/dd
- “Trace Files” – Activity by individual ICAO hex for all aircraft during one 24-hour period are sub-organized by last two digits of hex code.
https://samples.adsbexchange.com/traces/yyyy/mm/dd/xx/ - “hires-traces” – Same as trace files, but with an even higher sample rate of 2x per second, for detailed analysis of flightpaths, accidents, etc.
https://samples.adsbexchange.com/hires-traces/yyyy/mm/dd/xx - “ACAS” – TCAS/ACAS alerts detected by our ground stations, by day. https://samples.adsbexchange.com/acas/yyyy/mm/dd/
- “operations” (in development) – Using ADS-B path data, we determine takeoffs and landings (with runway used) at airports and heliports worldwide.
Supplementary Information
Explanation of data fields: https://www.adsbexchange.com/version-2-api
Aircraft database (updated daily from government and various sources): http://downloads.adsbexchange.com/downloads/basic-ac-db.json.gz
Please note that all files are in gzip compressed format. “traces” and “hires-traces” are in gzip format, but do not have the .gz extension. Your web browser may uncompress and display the raw JSON files based on the headers, but any programmatic access should anticipate gzipped JSON.
Request Sample Historical Data
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