Credits & Data Sources

CatchFlights shows real aircraft, real routes and real airports. Almost none of that is ours: it comes from people who collect ADS-B signals with their own receivers and publish the result for anyone to use. This page names them and the terms their data comes under.

Routes

Where a flight came from and where it is going is not read off the aircraft — nothing it transmits says so. We work it out by analysing where aircraft were actually observed taking off and landing, from two open records of worldwide ADS-B tracks:

• adsb.lol globe_history — the daily record of worldwide ADS-B tracks, gathered by a community network of volunteer-run receivers and licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL).
• MrAirspace aircraft-flight-schedules — flights extracted from that same record and published per quarter, also under the ODbL.

The route database we derive from the two ODbL sources is itself available under the ODbL: a fresh snapshot is published every day at https://github.com/catchflights/routes.

Airlines, airports and aircraft types

VRS standing-data by Andrew Whewell — airline, airport and route reference data, dedicated to the public domain (CC0).

mwgg/Airports — the airport table the app carries on the device (MIT).

Photos

Aircraft photos are loaded from Planespotters.net and Wikimedia Commons, each shown with its photographer's credit.

Thank you

None of these projects owe us anything, and the game would not exist without them. If you find CatchFlights useful, consider supporting them too.

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