NASA Logo U. S. Flight Track Database

This flight track work is part of a larger effort to understand the effects of contrail derived anthropogenic cirrus clouds on global climate. For more information please refer to the NASA Langley Cloud and Radiation Research page of Dr. Patrick Minnis.

Data Description

This page provides access to a new air traffic database with coverage over the contiguous United States of America (USA). Both individual flight tracks and gridded spatially integrated flight statistics are available.

Commercial flight information, taken in real time over the USA from the FlyteTrax system developed by FlyteComm, Inc., has been purchased and archived at NASA Langley Research Center since September 2000. The raw data acquired from FlyteComm consist of 2-, 5-, or 10-minute reports of flight ID, aircraft type, download time, latitude, longitude, altitude, heading, origination and destination locations, speed, and departure and arrival times. All portions of flights between 25,000 ft (7.62 km) and 49,200 ft (15.00 km), between 20 North and 50 North latitude, and between 60 West and 135 West longitude were quality controlled, sorted by flight number and time, and grouped into days from 0 UTC to 24 UTC.

Flights remaining after passing the quality control checks were then used to develop the database, which is divided into two parts: linear and gridded. The linear part contains individual node points defining the path of each flight in space and time. These node points consist of the original reported aircraft positions as well as interpolated points that lie on the boundaries of a grid imposed on the analysis region defined above. The grid spacing is 1 degree in both latitude and longitude, one hour in time (UTC), and 1 km in altitude from 7 to 15 km. Linear interpolation was used directly for altitude and time and along great circle arc lengths for latitude and longitude. Interpolating to node points along grid boundaries allows collection of statistics for individual cells in the gridded part of the database. The gridded database, provided in cell files, contains the number of flight track segments and the total length of flight track segments in each spacial grid cell for each hour of each day.

Data Links

Note

Some months ago, flight track data ingest was changed from one type of computer to another. A difference in the way the new C compiler handled dynamic memory allocation caused some of the raw data arriving from FlyteComm, Inc. to be eliminated from further analysis. The problem was discovered after it was noted that the quantity of valid data seemed to be decreasing. Archived data was reprocessed with a modified C program that accounted for the new memory allocation 'feature' and the updated data was posted on the FTP site on 10 February 2005. The data that were replaced span the months from April 2004 to December 2004. Data summaries were updated to reflect the new validation statistics.

References

Donald P. Garber, Patrick Minnis, and P. Kay Costulis: A commercial flight track database for upper tropospheric aircraft emission studies over the USA and southern Canada. Meteorologische Zeitschrift, Vol. 14, No. 4, 445-452 (August 2005).
Available from E. Schweizerbart Science Publishers.

Available also in rough form from Langley Research Center.

If you have questions about this site, you may send email to Don Garber at donald.p.garber@nasa.gov.

This page was last modified on 7 October 2005.