FlightAware Live Flight Tracking

FlightAware Live Flight Tracking is the Air Freight & Logistics catalog's movement-layer record: global aircraft positions, airport arrivals and departures boards, and per-flight tracks spanning passenger and cargo operations alike. Underneath sits one of aviation's larger sensor meshes - more than 41,000 terrestrial ADS-B receivers fused with space-based ADS-B, datalink and radar feeds - holding over 699 million flights, with roughly 201,000 arrivals tracked in any given day and 12,661 aircraft airborne at research time in August 2026. For a freight team that means a widebody over the Pacific resolves with the same fidelity as a regional shuttle over Kansas.

Get a sample of this dataset to see live boards and track fields laid against your lanes.

Five arrivals off one airport board - Atlanta's KATL arrivals - captured in a two-hour window:

ident  : UPS1302   type  : B763
origin : Muhammad Ali Intl (SDF)
board  : KATL arrivals   depart: 03:38a EDT   arrive: 04:34a EDT

ident  : CLX8      type  : B744
origin : Luis Munoz Marin Intl (SJU)
board  : KATL arrivals   depart: 12:01a AST   arrive: 03:02a EDT

ident  : ATN3331   type  : B763
origin : Wilmington Air Park (ILN)
board  : KATL arrivals   depart: 12:44a EDT   arrive: 01:44a EDT

ident  : THY6044   type  : B744
origin : John F Kennedy Intl (JFK)
board  : KATL arrivals   depart: 10:56p EDT   arrive: 01:04a EDT

ident  : DAL2430   type  : A321
origin : Newark Liberty Intl (EWR)
board  : KATL arrivals   depart: 02:17a EDT   arrive: 04:04a EDT

Read the anatomy rather than the individual flights: a UPS freighter out of Louisville, a 747 out of San Juan, a 767 out of Wilmington Air Park, a 747 out of JFK and a domestic A321 from Newark, all on one surface. Tail-level identifiers, local-timezone stamps, scheduled and actual times side by side - the exact columns any delay feature, dwell study or lane baseline needs, with no joining required.

Nine documented fields carry every row. Seven are exemplified directly on the airport boards; two live-track fields are defined but carry no board-level example, so their observed values fold under additional fields on request.

• Geography: Global - more than 41,000 terrestrial ADS-B receivers plus space-based ADS-B, datalink and radar feeds, so oceanic segments resolve alongside continental corridors.
• Temporal: Live positions now, with historical flight records reaching back to 1 January 2011 - fourteen years of lane history, enough to span the pandemic disruption and the e-commerce freight surge inside a single dataset.
• Granularity: Per-flight position and event records, rolling up to airport-level arrivals and departures boards, so the same feed serves a per-tail investigation and a whole-airport congestion view.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Every delivery ships the complete field dictionary above, the sample rows and the coverage profile mapped to your scope - no integration archaeology on your side.

1. Air-network operations analysts watch corridor health: board-level arrivals against schedules expose chronically late banks into hubs like Atlanta or Louisville, freighter and passenger alike.
2. Investors and quants read freighter activity as an alternative volume signal between official releases - tail-level counts by operator and lane rather than lagged statistics.
3. Competitive-intel and product teams benchmark carrier presence airport by airport, with the freighter-versus-passenger mix visible in the same pull.
4. Journalists and academics document specific movements with timestamped, citable track records instead of recollection.

Across all four, the constant is that identification travels with the movement: the ident joins a board sighting to its full track and its place in the historical record without a second lookup table.

Notes worth having in hand:

• Sensor mesh, not a single tower - Coverage rests on 41,000+ ground receivers plus space-based ADS-B - positions persist where radar never reaches.
• Freighters on the same boards - UPS, FedEx, Atlas Air and peer freighter movements share the arrival and departure surfaces with passenger traffic - cargo needs no separate view.
• History depth - Records reach back to 1 January 2011, so lane baselines span multiple demand cycles inside one dataset.
• Scale on the clock - Over 699 million flights held; roughly 201,000 arrivals tracked per day; 12,661 aircraft airborne at research time.

Where this set stops, neighbors pick up: OpenSky Network's historical state vectors as the openly accessible ADS-B counterpart, BTS Form 41 traffic for monthly carrier-level aggregates, Eurostat's main-airports series for the European mirror, and TAC Index for the rate layer none of the movement sets carry.