Where does the data on this site come from?
01/ 4/2023The City’s NOMS (Noise and Operations Management System) provider Casper collects data from multiple sources to ensure accuracy and to plan for contingencies. The primary source used for most flight tracking is a data feed provided by the FAA known as System Wide Information Management or SWIM. Casper collects data from both a primary and backup FAA SWIM feed center, in the case of an outage. To supplement that data, Casper pulls flight plan information from FlightAware, and further aircraft type specifications from a database known as FlightGlobal. Beginning in December 2022, Casper also integrated data from a network of physical transponders known as ADS-B Exchange. This helps to pick up flight tracks from aircraft that have historically been able to hide their location from most other public feeds. Because these data feeds are all working to supplement each other on the server-side, the end result is a blend of what all of them collected, meaning that the data points in Noise Lab and the flight tracks in Flight Tracker look as though they have come from one single source.