data

What the data covers

The repository centralizes common aeronautical reference data that the Airframes project and its contributors have collected, crafted and pruned for public consumption. It is separate from the feed messages historical database, which the team plans to expose through an API free for feeders and significant contributors. The maintainers describe the work as doing the dirty work of finding and providing data in one central place so that downstream projects do not repeat it.

How licensing works

Use of the data is governed by three license options. Non commercial use is allowed and encouraged at no cost, with a small optional attribution request. A significant contributor who submits meaningful data files or gives a minimum annual contribution may use the data without attribution for non commercial purposes. Commercial use requires purchasing an annual license, and each commercial license entitles the project to be listed on the repository at the licensee's request.

Projects that build on it

The data already powers several public tracking applications. Airframes itself aggregates ACARS, VDL, HFDL and SATCOM feeds, while ACARS Hub visualizes local ACARS and VDL feeds as a web application, and Airplanes.Live aggregates ADS-B data. Contributions to the scripts and data are welcomed through pull requests, and the contributor list names Kevin Elliott as the primary Airframes contributor along with Fred Clausen for VDL ground station data and other partners.

Editorial conclusion

Airframes data is written in Ruby and carries no SPDX license tag in the catalog metadata. The project asks commercial users to contact licensing at airframes.io before reuse.