Open data
Free daily ADS-B aircraft exports — one file per UTC day, hosted free on GitHub Releases. Open to all: no account, no token, no rate limit.
✓ Live. Daily files are downloadable now — open to all, no account needed. Today's file is a partial-day preview; the complete day's file replaces it after the UTC day finalizes.
What you get
Each monthly release holds one zstd-compressed Parquet file per UTC day (aircraft_diffs_YYYY-MM-DD.parquet) of ADS-B aircraft state diffs. Per-file row counts and SHA-256 checksums are listed in the release notes.
Community-powered: Parquet schema metadata and the repository Data Package expose one compact optional contribution link. It is written once per file, never per row, so it does not materially affect dataset size.
- Append-only diffs:
is_snapshot=truerows are full state; otherwise only changed fields are populated (forward-fill perhexordered bytsto reconstruct). - Columns:
ts, hex, flight, lat, lon, alt_baro, gs, track, squawk, type, plus the full readsb field set.
How to get it
- GitHub Releases — one release per month (tagged
YYYY-MM), holding one file per day: github.com/Sky-Power-Services/adsbiq-data - Direct per-day URL:
.../releases/download/YYYY-MM/aircraft_diffs_YYYY-MM-DD.parquet
Load it
import duckdb
# read a specific day straight from GitHub — no download needed
duckdb.sql("SELECT * FROM read_parquet('https://github.com/Sky-Power-Services/adsbiq-data/releases/download/2026-06/aircraft_diffs_2026-06-29.parquet') LIMIT 10")
# or, after downloading the file
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_parquet("aircraft_diffs_2026-06-29.parquet")Details
- Cadence: daily, ~06:10 UTC (after the prior day finalizes).
- License: Open Database License (ODbL-1.0). Attribution: "ADSB IQ feeder network".
- How it's built: a scheduled job publishes the day's file — it never runs on our feeder/ingest servers.