Private jet flights

This repository contains a CLI application to analyze flights of private jets.

It is supported by an S3 Blob storage container for caching data, thereby reducing its impact to https://adsbexchange.com/.

It resulted in a scientific publication in Communications Earth & Environment paper, and a bunch of press about it:

• Financial Times
• Associated Press
• The Guardian
• BBC
• The Times
• Der Spiegel
• National Geographic
• New Scientist
• Nature News
• AOL
• Lufkin Daily News
• AFR
• Los Angeles Times
• Castanet
• Salzburger NachrichtenSalzburger
• Exame
• Jornal de noticias
• Publico
• Tempo
• pplware
• Folha de São Paulo
• Globo
• AVV
• Morning Sun
• Kurier
• The Straits Times
• IFL Science
• Daily Mail
• The Mountaineer

How to use the data

The data is available in an https/s3 endpoint. See analysis.sql for an example of how to use it (in duckdb SQL).

pip install duckdb

python3 run_sql.py analysis.sql

See methodology.md for details of the full methodology and where data is available for consumption at different levels of aggregations.

Contributing

Risk and impact

This code performs API calls to https://adsbexchange.com/, a production website of a company.

Use critical thinking when using this code and how it impacts them.

We strongly recommend that if you plan to perform large scale analysis (e.g. in time or aircrafts), that you reach out via an issue before, so that we can work together to cache all hits to https://adsbexchange.com/ on an horizontally scaled remote storage and therefore remove its impact to adsbexchange.com of future calls.

All cached data is available on S3 blob storage at endpoint

https://private-jets.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com

and has anonymous and public read permissions. See methodology.md for details.

How to use

1. Install Rust
2. run cargo run --features="build-binary" --release --bin etl_aircrafts
3. open database/aircraft/db/date=<today date>/data.csv

Step 2. has an optional arguments, --access-key, --secret-access-key, specifying credentials to write to the remote storate, as opposed to disk.

In general:

• Use the default parameters when creating ad-hoc stories
• Use --access-key when improving the database with new data.

As of today, the flag --access-key is only available to the owner, as writing to the blob storage must be done through a controlled code base that preserves data integrity.

Examples:

# Create new snapshot of database of all aircrafts
cargo run --features="build-binary" --release --bin etl_aircrafts -- --access-key=DO00AUDGL32QLFKV8CEP --secret-access-key=$(cat secrets.txt)

# Build database of positions `[2019, 2024]`
cargo run --features="build-binary" --release --bin etl_positions -- --access-key=DO00AUDGL32QLFKV8CEP --secret-access-key=$(cat secrets.txt)
# they are available at
# https://private-jets.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/position/icao_number={icao}/month={year}-{month}/data.json

# Build database of legs `[2019, 2024]` (over existing positions computed by `etl_positions`)
cargo run --features="build-binary" --release --bin etl_legs -- --access-key=DO00AUDGL32QLFKV8CEP --secret-access-key=$(cat secrets.txt)
# they are available at
# https://private-jets.fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/leg/v1/data/icao_number={icao}/month={year}-{month}/data.csv

Licence

MIT, see LICENSE.md