TrajAir: A General Aviation Trajectory Dataset

General Aviation (GA) comprises all civil flights except scheduled passenger airline services. More than 90% of the roughly 220,000 civil aircraft registered in the United States (US) are GA aircraft. In contrast with airline service aircraft which operate with two pilots in a structured higher-altitude operational envelope, GA aircraft are often individually piloted in a more unstructured lower-altitude environment. This low altitude environment is also where a bulk of the next generation of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to operate. These UAVs are expected to seamlessly interact with other UAVs and manned air traffic operating in this shared airspace. Nowhere is this manned-manned and potentially unmanned-manned interaction more pronounced than in low-altitude terminal airspace around airports. Low altitudes, multi-agent close-proximity interactions, dynamically changing conditions, and rapid decision making are hallmarks of this type of airspace as compared to en-route airspace where agents are typically well-separated.
This dataset contains aircraft trajectories in an untowered terminal airspace collected over 8 months surrounding the Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport [ICAO:KBTP], a single runway GA airport, 10 miles North of the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The trajectory data is recorded using an on-site setup that includes an ADS-B receiver. The trajectory data provided spans days from 18 Sept 2020 till 23 Apr 2021 and includes a total of 111 days of data discounting downtime, repairs, and bad weather days with no traffic. Data is collected starting at 1:00 AM local time to 11:00 PM local time. The dataset uses an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) receiver placed within the airport premises to capture the trajectory data. The receiver uses both the 1090 MHz and 978 MHz frequencies to listen to these broadcasts. The ADS-B uses satellite navigation to produce accurate location and timestamp for the targets which is recorded on-site using our custom setup. Weather data during the data collection time period is also included for environmental context. The weather data is obtained post-hoc using the METeorological Aerodrome Reports (METAR) strings generated by the Automated Weather Observing System (AWOS) system at KBTP. The raw METAR string is then appended to the raw trajectory data by matching the closest UTC timestamps.
We also provide processed data that filters, interpolates and transforms data from a global frame to an airport-centred inertial frame. The inertial frame is centred at one end of the runway with the x-axis along the runway. Trajectories are filtered with aircrafts under 6000 ft MSL and around a 5km radius around the airport origin. We also remove duplicates and interpolate data every second. The proceed files also contain wind-data; a crucial factor in decision-making; separated in components along and perpendicular to the runway direction.
More Information and Supplemental Tools
Please visit http://theairlab.org/trajair/ for more information.