ADS-B flight paths of landings and takeoffs at Nantes Atlantique airport 2020-2023

Abstract

The airport Nantes Atlantique (IATA-Code: NTE, ICAO-Code: LFRS) in west France is a mid-sized international airport with around 7Mil passengers and 60.000 commercial flights annually (as of 2024). This dataset is a SQL dump of 3D flight paths and meta data of all arrival and departure flights which were equipped with an ADS-B transponder for the period 2020-2023.

Data recording

The ADS-B transmissions were recorded with an ADS-B receiver (by Flightaware), processed with custom written Python scripts and stored in a PostGis (v2.5) enabled PostGreSQL (v11.2) database. Only flight positions below 10.000 feet AGL (Above Ground Level, as determined by the aircraft) were stored, to filter out flights passing the area at cruise altitude (typically 30.000+ feet). Landing and takeoff events were identified using spatial relations and the change of the transmitted “on-ground” aircraft status. Based on the velocity vector of the aircraft during touchdown or takeoff, the runway was identified: 21 (compass direction 210°) or 03 (compass direction 30°).

Schemata and tables

The “public” schema includes the processed ADS-B data, broken down into four tables:

Positions table

Individual aircraft position records contain a unique id, parent flight id, a PointZ geometry (EPSG:4326 latitude & longitude and height AGL in meter), UTC time stamp and the “on-ground” boolean flag.

Flights table

This table contains two important ADS-B information: The ICAO hex code of the ADS-B transponder of the aircraft and the call sign of the flight. As transponder hardware is transferred between aircraft only in very rare cases, the hex code can be used to identify individual physical aircraft in the dataset. The call sign, on the other hand, is assigned to the flight by the airline and can change on a daily basis. As its first 3-4 characters is the ICAO abbreviation of the airline name, the full name can be deduced by joining these characters with the “airlines” table from the “meta” schema.

Landings and Takeoffs tables

These records contain the identified landing and takeoff events as flight id, landing or takeoff UTC time and the runway number.

The flight id acts as foreign key allowing the join of all four tables.

Limitations

Only ADS-B equipped flights, and which transmit their position, are contained in this dataset. By November 2024 approximately 97% of all civil aircraft in Europe were equipped with this transponder type (https://www.eurocontrol.int/service/adsb-equipage). Yet, military aircraft and some special flights might choose not to transmit.

The altitudes AGL of some flight tracks might have a bias of up to 100 feet relative to the airport altitude, such that there is a jump in altitude upon a landing or takeoff event (all “on-ground=TRUE” positions are forced to an altitude of 0m AGL). This bias is in the received ADS-B data and stored without correction.

Some flights land and takeoff within a short time period without switching off their ADS-B transponder, or practice touch-and-go maneuvers. This leads to their approach and departure legs forming one continuous track. Yet, each landing and takeoff event is identified and stored with a unique id.

Landing and takeoff events of the rescue helicopter of the Nantes hospital (CHU Nantes) are stored under its flight id SAMU44, as it lands for refueling at the airport.