OpenSky Report 2023: Low Altitude Traffic Awareness for Light Aircraft with FLARM

Established in 2013, The OpenSky Network, a crowdsourced network of ADS-B receivers, has consistently collected surveillance data from equipped aircraft and made it available for science. Coverage has steadily improved, boasting more than 6000 registered sensors worldwide today. This platform has aided numerous researchers in publishing studies across fields such as air traffic management, security, environment, and radio frequency interference. Following the 2020 mandate, most aircraft flying at high altitudes in Europe or Northern America are within range of one of the network’s ADS-B receivers. To complement existing research using OpenSky data, this paper focuses on lower altitude coverage, including light aircraft, general aviation, gliders, and ultralights, which are not required to carry ADS-B transponders. Instead, these often use, esp. in Europe, another traffic awareness and collision avoidance technology known as FLARM. The OpenSky Network has been gathering FLARM messages since 2018, and now enough data is available for a detailed analysis. The aim of this report is to present OpenSky’s FLARM data, explain the workings of the technology, and highlight potential uses of this data for future research.