Data Sources

This page is a trust asset, not fine print. The people who use TallyAir care where the data comes from, and several of the upstream licences require attribution as a condition of use. Treat every entry below as a contract term, not a courtesy.

TallyAir aggregates third-party data and displays it. It does not re-license it, resell it, or publish it as a database of its own, and it does not present any of it as authoritative. Every figure on a strip is somebody else’s observation, carried through with its errors intact. Where a licence names a required credit, that credit is reproduced below verbatim rather than summarised.

Licence text quoted on this page is quoted exactly as the source publishes it. Where TallyAir’s own position is stated, it is marked as TallyAir’s position and not as anything the upstream licensor has agreed to.

adsb.lol

Live ADS-B state vectors — position, altitude, velocity, squawk.

A community ADS-B aggregator run by @iakat as an individual, fed by volunteer receivers. Hosted on Netcup in Germany, with static data served from GitHub and proxied by Cloudflare.

Licence terms. The API is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0, and adsb.lol states its access policy in four words: “The API is available to everyone.” There is no key, no access tier, no rate-limit ladder tied to registration, and no restriction on commercial use. The obligations are the ODbL ones — attribute the source, keep the licence notice intact, and place any derived database under ODbL if it is publicly distributed.

On the share-alike term. As with OpenFlights, ODbL separates a derived database from a produced work. TallyAir displays records, which is a produced work and carries attribution only. Share-alike would attach if TallyAir publicly distributed a database built from this feed. It does not.

Required attribution. Credited as: live ADS-B data from adsb.lol, licensed under ODbL 1.0, with a link to adsb.lol. Carried on this page and in the app wherever live positions are drawn.

Warranty. adsb.lol disclaims accuracy in terms worth reproducing, because they describe exactly what a strip in TallyAir is:

ADSB.lol will use its best efforts to provide accurate data. However, except as otherwise provided herein, the data is provided on an “as is” basis. Except as otherwise provided herein, neither ADSB.lol, its partners, licensors, nor data providers make any warranty, either implied or express, of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, including, but not limited to, the accuracy, timeliness, completeness, reliability, or availability of ADSB.lol data, applications, or services accessible through or made available by ADSB.lol. Users acknowledge that ADSB.lol receives data from multiple sources it may or may not control, and that, except as otherwise provided herein, data integrity/accuracy cannot be guaranteed.

Feeding back. Waygate Technologies operates a receiver that feeds adsb.lol under CC0, alongside four other networks whose terms are not the same. TallyAir takes from this network and puts back into it. The commitment that involves, per network, is recorded under what the receiver contributes.

Contact of record. info@adsb.lol.

FAA Releasable Aircraft Registry

US aircraft registration — N-number and Mode S code to make, model, and series.

Source files: the Aircraft Registration Master file and the Aircraft Reference File by Make/Model/Series, from the FAA’s Releasable Aircraft Database download.

Licence terms. The database is a work of the United States government and is not subject to domestic copyright protection under 17 U.S.C. § 105. There is no licence to accept, no fee, and no attribution required as a condition of use. TallyAir credits it anyway, because provenance is the point of this page.

The FAA does publish conditions on how the data behaves rather than on how it is licensed. On the download page:

The data in the download is refreshed daily at 11:30 pm central time.

and, on the composition of the file:

The file is comprised of “Required” and “Permissible” data. Required data is information necessary to meet the minimum Regulatory requirements, while Permissible data is supplement and delivered during the course of users submitting information associated with the forms and documents to fulfill Aircraft registration service requests. Permissible data is therefore, not required, and only recorded when is provided. This is supplemental data was deemed valuable in supporting additional mission benefits, such as research activities. As a result of recording the supplemental data in the database, the fields associated with permissible data, may be blank and should not be considered in error.

Attribution and currency. Credited as: Federal Aviation Administration, Releasable Aircraft Database, aircraft registration data current as of the snapshot date shown in the app. The registry is a periodic dump, refreshed daily at source. TallyAir ships a snapshot and states its date wherever registration data is displayed. Displaying a stale registrant against a live aircraft is a real harm to a real person, not a cosmetic staleness problem, which is why the date travels with the data instead of living in a settings screen.

Privacy note. The Master file contains registrant names and addresses. TallyAir surfaces the registration (N-number), the Mode S transponder code that links a registration to an ADS-B transmission, and the make, model, and series from the Reference File.

TallyAir does not surface, and does not ship in its snapshot, the registrant name, street address, city, state, ZIP, county, or registrant type, nor any record from the Dealer Applicant or Document Index files. An aircraft in TallyAir is a type and a tail. It is not a person.

This matters beyond preference. Under 49 U.S.C. § 44114(b) the FAA operates a procedure by which private aircraft owners can request that personally identifiable information such as names and addresses be withheld from broad dissemination. A snapshot taken before such a request would continue publishing what the owner has since had withheld. Not carrying those fields at all is the only handling that cannot go wrong on a stale copy. See the privacy policy for what TallyAir collects about you, as distinct from what it displays about aircraft.

openAIP

Airspace boundaries, airports, navaids, frequencies.

Published by openAIP, © Garrecht Avionik GmbH, from contributions by its community.

Licence terms. openAIP data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). It is not an ODbL variant, and CC BY-NC 4.0 carries no share-alike term, so there is no copyleft obligation on any database TallyAir derives from it. The binding terms are attribution and non-commercial use. openAIP states the scope of that second term itself:

OpenAIP data is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. This license allows third parties to share openAIP data in any format or medium and remix, transform and build on it’s data. OpenAIP data must remain free for everyone to use. Third parties may ship openAIP data with paid/commercial applications as long as they don’t exclusively sell openAIP data, e.g. as a paid monthly data update.

TallyAir’s position. TallyAir ships openAIP data as reference context inside the app and never as a product in itself. It does not sell the data, does not offer it as a paid data subscription or update channel, and does not expose a bulk export of it. On openAIP’s own reading of the licence that is permitted whether or not TallyAir itself is ever paid.

Required attribution. Credited as: airspace and aerodrome data © openAIP contributors, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0, with a link to openaip.net and to the licence text. Carried on this page and in the app wherever airspace is drawn.

Currency note. openAIP is continuously edited by contributors rather than published on AIRAC cycles, so currency varies by region and by record. TallyAir ships a dated snapshot and shows that date with the airspace layer. This data is not to be used for flight planning, and TallyAir is not an electronic flight bag. See the terms of use for the operational disclaimer, which governs.

OpenFlights

Airport, airline, and route reference data.

Licence terms. Contrary to a common assumption, the licence is uniform across all four files. OpenFlights states:

The OpenFlights Airport, Airline, Plane and Route Databases are made available under the Open Database License. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License. In short, these mean that you are welcome to use the data as you wish, if and only if you both acknowledge the source and and license any derived works made available to the public with a free license as well.

What differs between the files is provenance, not licence. Airport data derives from OurAirports and DAFIF, and route data from Airline Route Mapper, all public domain; airline and plane data derives from Wikipedia and may be subject to the GNU Free Documentation License. OpenFlights adds that whether these databases pass the threshold of originality and are copyrightable in the United States “is an open question, and OpenFlights does not assert the validity or lack thereof of such a claim.”

On the share-alike term. ODbL 1.0 distinguishes a derived database from a produced work. Displaying records in an app is a produced work and carries an attribution obligation only. Share-alike attaches if TallyAir publicly distributes a database derived from these files. TallyAir does not, and will not without placing that database under ODbL first. Commercial licences are available from OpenFlights on request if that position ever changes.

Required attribution. Credited as: airport and airline reference data from OpenFlights, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0, with contents under the Database Contents License (DbCL) v1.0.

Currency note. OpenFlights warns that its route data source ceased providing updates in June 2014 and that the current data “is of historical value only.” TallyAir therefore uses OpenFlights for airport and airline reference only. Route information shown on a strip comes from the live flight, not from the OpenFlights route file. OpenFlights also states plainly that its data “is not suitable for navigation” and disclaims all warranties as to accuracy.

What the receiver contributes

Waygate Technologies operates an ADS-B receiver. It feeds five networks, and the terms those networks set for contributed data are not the same. Saying we “feed the community” would flatten a real difference between them, so each is recorded separately.

This section is about data leaving the receiver, not arriving. Feeding a network and reading from one are separate relationships under separate terms; where a network is also a source for the app, the licence it grants us is recorded in its own section above.

adsb.lol. Takes contributions under CC0, and says so:

By sending data to feed.adsb.lol / in.adsb.lol, you agree, to the extent possible under law, to waive all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the data you are sharing, under the CC0 license.

This is the only one of the five that states any licence over contributed data. Waiving copyright in our own observations is a commitment worth making on purpose rather than as a side effect of plugging in a Pi, and it is made on purpose: the reception costs us nothing to give away, and the network TallyAir reads from exists only because other people already do the same thing.

adsb.fi. States no licence over contributed data. Its privacy policy treats what a feeder sends as personal data rather than as a copyrightable work, covering the IP address, receiver name, unique identifier, precise location, software information, and the received flight data. Receiver name and approximate location are published; precise location is not, regardless of settings. Separately, adsb.fi restricts what it publishes — its open data terms say the data “is for personal, non-commercial use only.” TallyAir does not read from adsb.fi, so that restriction binds nothing in the app.

airplanes.live. Operated by AirDG LLC, a Wyoming company. Its terms of use are general website terms that never mention ADS-B or feeder data. The contribution licence they do carry is written for forum and message-board posts, and grants an “unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide” licence while also stating that “We do not assert any ownership over your Contributions.” Whether that clause reaches receiver data is not settled by anything airplanes.live publishes. TallyAir’s position is that it does not, because operating a receiver is not posting to a message board. The honest record is that the network has not said.

ADSBexchange. Now commercially owned; its legal pages resolve to JETNET’s terms of use. Those terms are the only ones of the five to claim contributed reception outright:

Company retains ownership of the raw ADS-B Data collected by the Receiver.

That clause governs here. It applies “In the event Customer receives an ADS-B Receiver (as defined below) as part of the Services described on the applicable Order Form,” and the receiver Waygate feeds it with was bought from ADSBexchange — their dongle, their antenna, on our Raspberry Pi. So on ADSBexchange’s own terms, the raw reception that hardware collects is theirs, not ours and not the public’s. We cannot place it under CC0, because it is not ours to place.

That is the exact inverse of adsb.lol, and the same antenna produces both outcomes. The distinction is not cosmetic: identical observations of the same sky are public domain when they arrive at one endpoint and company property when they arrive at another. TallyAir’s position is that the second arrangement is the wrong one, and we record it here rather than quietly enjoying the coverage it buys.

OpenSky Network. A non-profit association under Swiss law. It publishes no licence covering contributed data either. Its terms of use govern taking data out rather than putting it in, and they are restrictive in that direction: the licence is granted “solely for the purpose of non-profit research and non-profit education,” and “Any use by a for-profit or commercial entity requires written permission and a license granted by the OpenSky Network.” Nothing in those terms attaches a licence to what a receiver sends in, so feeding OpenSky settles no rights in the reception in either direction.

TallyAir’s position. Feeding several networks is a decision about coverage, not about licensing, and the terms are inconsistent because the networks disagree with each other, not because anything was negotiated on our behalf. Only adsb.lol’s terms match what we would choose as a default: contributed observations belong to nobody. Where a network is silent we have not assumed the generous reading, and where a network claims ownership we have said so on the same page that names it. The receiver keeps feeding all five, because coverage is worth more to the people flying under it than a tidier version of this page is worth to us.

Corrections

TallyAir cannot correct upstream data. A wrong registration, a mislabelled airspace, or a missing airport is wrong in the source, and TallyAir can only refresh its snapshot once the source has fixed it. Reporting it to us fixes nothing on its own, so send it where it can actually be repaired:

• Aircraft registration — the FAA Civil Aviation Registry, through the registration service that issued the record. Owners who want their name and address withheld from public dissemination should use the FAA’s process under 49 U.S.C. § 44114(b); TallyAir does not carry those fields in any case.
• Airspace, airports, navaids, frequencies — openAIP, which takes corrections directly from contributors at openaip.net.
• Airport or airline reference data — OpenFlights, which asks for corrections through its own site.
• Live position, altitude, or squawk — nobody can correct these after the fact. They are volunteer receiver observations of a transponder, and gaps, stale positions, and misreported values are normal. See the terms of use.

If TallyAir is showing something the source has already fixed, that is ours: it means the snapshot is stale. Tell us and we will refresh it.