State-of-the-Art Analysis of U.S. Flight Event and Surveillance Data Coverage and Future Research Directions

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast mandate, along with advances in government and third-party flight tracking systems, has allowed researchers to analyze aspects of aviation operations that were not possible beforehand. The purpose of this study is to provide: 1) a summary of flight event data available to the public, 2) a comparison of application programming interface surveillance data available in the U.S., and 3) an evaluation of flight coverage across the data sources. This analysis considers the FAA’s Aviation System Performance Metrics, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ Airline Service Quality Performance System, the Official Airline Guide’s On-Time Performance Flight dataset, the FAA’s System Wide Information Management (SWIM), and the OpenSky Network (OSN). It reports the spatial and market segment (i.e., commercial, general aviation, air cargo) coverage, helping researchers identify the appropriate dataset for their studies. This study found that OSN has worldwide coverage of enroute flights, with limited airport surface movement. FAA’s SWIM contains several surveillance datasets, two enroute (only one includes Alaska and Hawaii), and one airport surface datasets. Combining sources allows one source to overcome a spatial limitation of another to generate a complete trajectory. The flight counts by source are reported with a discussion of their discrepancies, where surveillance sources do not capture all flights from the flight event datasets and vice versa. Therefore, surveillance should be considered supplemental and not a replacement for measuring flight counts. This paper then discusses future research directions, given surveillance availability.