FAA Airport Status Scraper — NAS Ground Delays & Closures

Pull the live FAA National Airspace System (NAS) status feed as structured rows: every active U.S. airport ground delay program, ground stop, arrival delay, and airport closure, with the FAA's stated reason and expected duration. Powers operational dashboards, travel-disruption apps, aviation analytics pipelines, and crew/dispatch tooling.

The FAA publishes a live XML feed of every NAS-level disruption affecting commercial aviation. This actor parses that feed into clean rows you can push straight into Snowflake, Postgres, Slack alerts, or a dashboard.

What you get

The actor emits one snapshot row plus one row per active disruption.

Field	Description
recordType	snapshot, delay, closure, other, or error
delayType	Ground Delay Programs, Ground Stops, Arrival Delay, General Departure Delay, Airport Closures, Snapshot
airportCode	3-letter FAA/IATA airport code
reason	FAA-reported reason (e.g. "low ceilings", "thunderstorms", FAA NOTAM text for closures)
averageDelay	Average delay (e.g. "1 hour and 3 minutes") for delay programs
maxDelay	Maximum reported delay
closureStart	Closure start time (UTC)
closureReopen	Reopen time (UTC)
updateTimeUtc	Feed Update_Time
counts	(snapshot only) per-category counts
sourceUrl	Original feed URL

How to scrape FAA airport status

1. Click Try for free to start a default run.
2. Optionally set airportFilter to a specific airport (e.g. "SFO") or delayTypeFilter to one category.
3. Run on a schedule (every 5–15 min) to track NAS state over time. The dataset is JSON / CSV / Excel / Markdown ready.

Empty input always returns at least the snapshot row so downstream pipelines never see a zero-row response.

Pricing

$0.003 per record. A typical NAS poll returns 1–30 rows, so a single run costs cents. Apify compute is billed separately.

Example input

{
    "airportFilter": "",
    "delayTypeFilter": "Airport Closures",
    "includeSnapshot": true,
    "maxResults": 0
}

Example output (delay row)

{
    "recordType": "delay",
    "delayType": "Ground Delay Programs",
    "airportCode": "SFO",
    "reason": "low ceilings",
    "averageDelay": "1 hour and 3 minutes",
    "maxDelay": "2 hours and 13 minutes",
    "updateTimeUtc": "Tue May 5 16:31:47 2026 GMT",
    "sourceUrl": "https://nasstatus.faa.gov/api/airport-status-information"
}

Use cases

• Travel apps — Surface real-time disruption banners to passengers.
• Airline / cargo ops — Auto-route around ground stops and closures.
• Analytics / BI — Build historic NAS disruption trendlines.
• News & data journalism — Track which airports get hit most, and why.

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FAQ

Q: How often is the feed updated? A: The FAA refreshes every minute or two. Polling more often than every 60 seconds is rarely useful.

Q: Why are there sometimes 0 delays? A: A clean NAS state really does mean no active programs. The actor still emits a snapshot row so your dataset is never empty.

Q: How do I detect when a delay starts/ends? A: Run on a schedule and diff the airportCode + delayType set across runs. Use the updateTimeUtc field to deduplicate within the same FAA refresh cycle.

Legal

Data is sourced from the public FAA NAS status feed (nasstatus.faa.gov). This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FAA. The feed is published for public use; verify any operational decision against the original source.