🛰️ OpenSky Network - Live Flight Tracker & ADS-B Data Scraper

🚀 Export live global flight positions in seconds. Track 10,000+ airborne flights in real time with ADS-B fields including callsign, altitude, speed, heading, and vertical rate. No API key, no login, no pipeline engineering.

The OpenSky Network Flight Scraper pulls live transponder data from the OpenSky Network public API and returns 12 fields per record, including ICAO24 address, callsign, origin country, GPS coordinates, barometric altitude, ground speed, heading, and vertical rate. OpenSky is the world's largest open ADS-B network, maintained by a community of volunteers and academics since 2013.

The dataset covers every airborne flight with an ADS-B or Mode S transponder, updated every few seconds from a global network of receivers. This Actor makes that data downloadable as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML with optional bounding-box and ground/air filtering. No parser engineering, no API authentication, no manual work.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Aviation analysts, flight-tracking app developers, GIS engineers, researchers, logistics teams, drone operators, data journalists	Live flight heatmaps, airspace monitoring, ADS-B data feeds, aviation research, drone proximity checks, geospatial dashboards

📋 What the OpenSky Network Scraper does

Four core workflows in a single run:

• 🌍 Worldwide snapshot. Every transponder-equipped aircraft visible to the network right now.
• 📐 Bounding-box filter. Restrict to any lat/lon region - a country, a city, an airport corridor.
• 🛬 Ground filter. Return only aircraft currently on the ground (taxiing, parked, holding short).
• ⚡ Speed run. Set maxItems to a small number for instant dashboards with no data waste.

Each record includes the ICAO24 transponder address, callsign, country of registration, GPS coordinates, barometric altitude, speed, heading, vertical rate, and a direct link to the aircraft's profile on the OpenSky Network website.

💡 Why it matters: building your own ADS-B data pipeline means managing WebSocket streams, receiver networks, and state-vector parsing. This Actor skips all of that. One click, one dataset, every live flight on the planet.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: altitude, callsign, heading, icao24, latitude, longitude, onGround, originCountry, results, scrapedAt, url, velocity, verticalRate. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the OpenSky Network Flight Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Enter a bounding box for a region, toggle ground-only, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your live flight snapshot.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 2-3 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

Actor	Description
✈️ OurAirports Global Airport Database Scraper	85,000+ airports, heliports, and airfields worldwide with ICAO/IATA codes
✈️ FAA Aircraft Registry Scraper	U.S. civil aircraft registrations and owners - cross-reference ICAO24 addresses
🗺️ Nominatim OSM Scraper - Geocode coordinates to addresses via OpenStreetMap
🏢 FDIC Bank Scraper	U.S. bank locations and financial data for logistics enrichment
📊 EPA AQS Air Quality Scraper	EPA air quality monitoring data for environmental correlation studies

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more open-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the OpenSky Network, its contributors, or any aviation authority. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open ADS-B data from the OpenSky Network public API is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.