Retrieve live aircraft state vectors from the OpenSky Network API
domain: opensky-network.org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Register an OpenSky account and create an API client (client_id/client_secret) via the OpenSky account page; legacy basic username/password auth was retired March 18, 2026.
Exchange client credentials for a bearer token via POST to https://auth.opensky-network.org/auth/realms/opensky-network/protocol/openid-connect/token with grant_type=client_credentials.
Call GET https://opensky-network.org/api/states/all with the bearer token in the Authorization header, optionally filtering by icao24 or a bounding box (lamin/lomin/lamax/lomax).
Parse the returned "states" array using the documented fixed column order (icao24, callsign, origin_country, lat/lon, velocity, altitude, etc.).
Refresh the bearer token before it expires and re-poll on an interval that respects rate limits for authenticated users.
Known gotchas
Legacy basic auth (username/password) is decommissioned as of March 2026 - old-style credentials will fail silently; OAuth2 client-credentials is now required.
Bearer tokens expire in roughly 30 minutes, so token refresh logic is required rather than a single long-lived key.
Anonymous/unauthenticated requests are heavily rate-limited and lag further behind real time than authenticated requests.
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