I’m very enthusiastic about both data science and plane travel. I found a way of combining these two passions. It stared from my frequently visiting flight tracking websites like adsbexchange.com or flightradar24.com. The next step for me was to build my own ADS-B receiver using Raspberry Pi. I stared with small antenna by the windows and quickly changed my setup to use big antenna on the top of my house. My Raspberry collects and shares data for over 8 years now (that reminds me, that I’ve never updated it). It receives signals from planes as far as 250 miles from my house. I’ve done some interesting data science using this data, but quickly realized that I’m hungry for more data.

Over 4 years ago I had an idea to start collecting data about all planes around the globe and storing it in the database for future science. I spend time searching for data sources, designing the database and all related processes and finally started collecting data. I started collecting data in November 2018.

Today, almost 4 years later I have a decent database to play with. The database is over 16 billion rows (1.6e10) and occupies almost 3 TB of disk space. I’m using Google BigQuery to store the data ans Docker to run the whole related infrastructure.

I’m going to share some of the most interesting analysis I was able to do with this data. I hope you will find it interesting and maybe even useful. Stay tuned!