Data sources
FlyerIntel combines official public data with its own normalisation and analysis. Everything below is either a source we ingest or a limitation we think you should know about.
Sources we ingest
Aviation Weather Center — METAR
NOAA / National Weather Service Aviation Weather Center
Routine aerodrome weather observations for each airport: wind, visibility, ceiling, temperature, precipitation and flight category. FlyerIntel decodes these and derives its own operational impact assessment.
Updates: Hourly, with special observations issued when conditions change materially.
Licence: US Government public domain
Limitations: An observation describes conditions at the field at one moment. It does not describe en-route weather, and it does not by itself establish that any particular flight will be delayed.
Aviation Weather Center — TAF
NOAA / National Weather Service Aviation Weather Center
Terminal aerodrome forecasts covering the 24 to 30 hours ahead at each airport, used for forward-looking operational weather context.
Updates: Issued every six hours, amended as needed.
Licence: US Government public domain
Limitations: A forecast is a probability statement about airfield conditions, not a prediction about any individual flight.
FAA National Airspace System Status
Federal Aviation Administration
Current airport-level operational events across the national airspace system: ground stops, ground delay programs, airport closures and general arrival or departure delay conditions.
Updates: Continuously; FlyerIntel polls every few minutes.
Licence: US Government public domain
Limitations: Reports conditions at the airport level. An airport operating normally does not guarantee any individual flight is on time, and the feed does not cover every operational restriction.
FlyerIntel analysis
FlyerIntel
Statistics, reliability scores, percentile cohorts and time-of-day analysis computed by FlyerIntel from the sources above. Methods are published and every figure is reproducible from the underlying data.
Updates: Recomputed whenever new source data is ingested.
Licence: Proprietary
Limitations: Derived figures inherit the coverage limits of their inputs and are only published where sample-size thresholds are met.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
City of Atlanta Department of Aviation
Official airport reference information for ATL: terminal and concourse layout, airline locations, parking facilities and published rates, and ground transportation.
Updates: Verified against the airport website; each fact carries its own verification date.
Licence: Airport published information, used with attribution
Limitations: Airport-published details change without notice. Every ATL reference fact on FlyerIntel shows when it was last verified; confirm time-critical details with the airport directly.
OurAirports airport database
OurAirports
Airport identity reference data: ICAO codes, coordinates, elevation, municipality and region, used to establish and verify FlyerIntel airport records.
Updates: Continuously maintained; FlyerIntel refreshes on demand.
Licence: Public domain (dedicated by the project)
Limitations: Community maintained. FlyerIntel treats it as a cross-check against the codes present in federal data rather than as an operational source.
Reporting Carrier On-Time Performance
US Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics
Individual records for every scheduled domestic flight operated by carriers that meet the DOT reporting threshold. Includes scheduled and actual departure and arrival times, delay minutes, cancellation and diversion flags, taxi times, distance and delay cause categories. This is the backbone of every historical reliability figure on FlyerIntel.
Updates: Monthly, released roughly two to three months after the month it covers.
Licence: US Government public domain
Limitations: Covers only carriers above the DOT reporting threshold, and only flights between points within the United States and its territories. Regional flights operated under a mainline brand are reported by the operating carrier, not the marketing carrier. Delay cause minutes are only reported for arrivals delayed 15 minutes or more.
What we currently cannot collect
FlyerIntel only collects data it is permitted to collect. Where a source blocks automated access, we do not work around it — we leave the section empty and say why. Two limitations currently affect the product:
FAA National Airspace System status
The FAA publishes current ground stops, ground delay programs and airport closures at nasstatus.faa.gov. The feed is US Government public domain and the site’s robots.txt permits automated access, but requests from FlyerIntel’s server are refused at the CDN edge with an HTTP 403, which appears to be a blanket block on datacenter address ranges rather than a policy decision about this feed.
The collector, the normalisation model and the operational-event storage are all built and tested. Until a permitted route to the data exists — an allow-listed address, or an official API — FlyerIntel does not display FAA operational conditions, and airport status is marked Limited data rather than presented as if the airspace system were known to be running normally. Last attempt returned: HttpError: HTTP 403 for https://nasstatus.faa.gov/api/airport-status-information
Airport security waits and parking
Many airports publish checkpoint wait times and parking availability on their own websites. Where an airport serves that data through an official API or a public feed, FlyerIntel ingests it, normalises it into a common format and preserves a history so that patterns can be analysed over time.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport currently serves every path on atl.com — including robots.txt — behind an interactive challenge that has to be solved in a browser. That is an access control the airport has deliberately put in place, and defeating it is not something FlyerIntel does. ATL security and parking modules are therefore empty. Everything else on the ATL profile — reliability, best times to fly, carrier performance and aviation weather — is unaffected.
If you operate an airport and would like your published data represented accurately on FlyerIntel, we would rather work from a source you sanction than from anything else.
How we treat sources
Official sources first
We prefer machine-readable data published by the operator of the thing being described — the airport, the airline, or the agency that regulates them.
Attribution on every module
Anything that comes from a source names that source and shows when it was retrieved. Anything FlyerIntel calculated says so.
Access rules respected
We check robots and terms before building a connector, cache responsibly, identify our collector with a contactable user agent, and never bypass a control.
Failure is visible, not filled in
A broken connector leaves the previous value in place marked stale, or shows nothing. It never substitutes an estimate, and it never takes down the rest of a page.