The aviation niche looks impenetrable at first: proprietary flight feeds, licensing fees, and a wall of "contact sales" forms. But most of the data people actually pay for is already public — it's just scattered across six or seven government and community sources that nobody bothered to stitch together.
So I built an aviation hub actor that does exactly that: one input, six keyless upstreams, six output modes.
The gap
The reference actor in this niche did the same job, but its live mode returned zero rows in our trial — its single ADS-B feed was empty at the time. One feed, no fallback, no resilience. Ours ships six modes:
- Airports — 85K+ entries from OurAirports (public domain), including runways
- Airlines — the OpenFlights registry with country and callsign data
- Routes — geocoded endpoints plus great-circle distance in kilometres
- Live — adsb.lol community ADS-B with an OpenSky anonymous fallback, so live never returns empty when either feed has coverage
- Weather — NOAA METAR JSON from aviationweather.gov
- Digest — a market summary: busiest airports, biggest airlines, most common aircraft types
Reverse-engineering
The trickiest part was the route mode: OpenFlights gives you source/destination pairs, but not coordinates. I geocode both ends and compute great-circle distance — one formula, no API key, works for every pair in the registry.
The live mode needed the fallback architecture: try adsb.lol first, and if the feed is thin or empty, flip to OpenSky's anonymous endpoint. The reference's single-feed design was its weakness; the fallback is the whole point.
The smoke test
Six modes, six cloud runs, all non-zero:
- airports — Romanian airports (Bacău, Belfast shapes correct)
- airlines — Tarom returned with country + callsign
- routes — OTP→LHR, American Airlines at 5,539.8 km great-circle
- live — BAW416 (G-DBCA, A319) tracked near EGLL via adsb.lol
- weather — LROP METAR, VFR conditions
- digest — 85,892 airports, matching the reference digest total exactly
The honest bits
- Live coverage depends on community ADS-B volunteers; the OpenSky fallback helps but isn't a paid-quality feed
- METAR is aviation weather only — no TAF long-range forecasts in this mode
- Route distances are great-circle, not flight-path
Try it
More from me
While you're here, these might be worth a read:
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