Historical Ads-B Flight Data Download Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

Every row is a positional array keyed by the ICAO24 transponder address, so a cargo-freighter track decomposes like this:

1. icao24 - the unique 24-bit address in hex (sample value 3c6444), the join key to registries and type codes.
2. callsign - up to 8 characters (DLH441), null when none was received.
3. Position - WGS-84 longitude and latitude in decimal degrees, nullable.
4. Altitude - barometric and geometric, both in meters.
5. Motion - ground velocity in m/s, true track in degrees clockwise from north, vertical rate positive climbing and negative descending.
6. Context - origin country inferred from the ICAO24 block, Unix timestamps time_position and last_contact, transponder squawk, special-purpose indicator flag, and position_source (0 ADS-B, 1 ASTERIX, 2 MLAT, 3 FLARM) so mixed-sensor tracks stay identifiable.
7. category - when extended=1 is requested, a 0-20 aircraft category where 6 marks heavies above 300,000 lbs.

A sample capture from the 21 August 2026 research pass shows callsign EJU46EK at 11,551.92 meters geometric altitude doing 245.06 m/s - the granularity you get on every covered movement.

Three routes, split by how far back you need:

A concrete pattern for a cargo-utilisation study: filter state_vectors_data4 on one hour partition, keep rows where callsign matches your target operator prefix and on_ground = false, then aggregate velocity and vertical-rate samples into cruise-versus-climb shares. Repeat per hour partition inside the two-concurrent limit. Note that Trino accounts are granted by application review to university-affiliated researchers, government organizations and aviation authorities - budget that approval step before your project timeline assumes data in hand.

ADS-B Exchange Historical Data, cataloged in Datadory's agricultural-products-services slice as a related dataset, is the commercial mirror image of OpenSky: unfiltered coverage including military, private and blocked (PIA/LADD) airframes, sold rather than research-gated. Its archive splits into four product families:

1. readsb-hist snapshots - all airborne traffic archived at fixed intervals back to July 2016, tightening to roughly five-second sampling from May 2020.
2. Per-hex trace files - organized by date and last two hex digits, with a high-resolution variant sampled twice per second from February 2022.
3. flights-ax-v2 - complete origin-to-destination flight records in CSV from July 2024; a verified 1 July 2026 file held 101,898 flights with callsign, origin and destination codes, scheduled times, registration, hex, equipment and wake category.
4. operations-ax-v2 - takeoff and landing events with runway used; the same-date verification file held 327,410 events across 28 columns.

Delivery runs over public sample buckets, REST API, gRPC streaming and S3-compatible pulls as gzip-compressed JSON or CSV, and a daily basic aircraft database holds 615,568 airframes. The catch mirrors OpenSky's in reverse: subscriptions carry minimum annual commitments, exclude one-time extracts, and gate backfills up to ten years behind payment - first-of-month complete data is published free but scoped strictly to testing and evaluation.

Raw state vectors answer where an aircraft flew; they say nothing about what it carried. Pair the telemetry with the slice's public-domain aggregates, which cover commercial reuse without negotiation:

FlightAware Live Flight Tracking fuses more than 41,000 terrestrial ADS-B receivers with Aireon satellite ADS-B, ACARS datalink and radar feeds, against a database of over 699 million flights and roughly 201,000 arrivals tracked per day. Freighter movements sit throughout it - FedEx, UPS and Atlas Air flights are tracked identically to passenger traffic - which makes the public site a fast qualitative check on cargo routings.