Historical data

the whole sky, archived every day, free to download.

license: ODbL 1.0, use it freely, just keep it open.

what is inside

one release = one day of the whole sky, as gzip-compressed JSON written by readsb.

• per aircraft: callsign (flight), hex, type, altitude, gs, track,

vertical rate, squawk, category, lat/lon.

• per point: signal quality (nic, nac_p, sil, rc, rssi) and how we

placed it: adsb, mlat or tisb.

• two folders: traces/ (one file per aircraft, per day) and heatmap/

(one small file per day, the replay point cloud).

exact per-record schema: readsb's trace format.

grab it

the dump runs once a day and lands as a GitHub release, one per instance:

• readsb-prod-0
• readsb-prod-1
• readsb-staging-0

prod is what powers adsb.lol; use it, and fall back to staging for a day if prod looks short.

everything is here: https://github.com/adsblol/globe_history

each release is split into .aa, .ab, ... parts. join the parts and untar:

mkdir 2025.05.18
cat v2025.05.18-planes-readsb-prod-0.tar.aa v2025.05.18-planes-readsb-prod-0.tar.ab | tar -xf - -C 2025.05.18

use it

point your tooling straight at the releases, or clone globe_history and let it fetch and index the data for you. build something with it.