Airport coverage rankings

How much of a flight OpenSky’s receivers actually see, per aerodrome.

When an aircraft moves at a European airport, how much of that movement do OpenSky’s receivers actually see?

The flight is nearly always spotted somewhere: detection is above 99% almost everywhere. But that’s not the same as being followed across the apron and down the runway: what these rankings measure.

Both tables cover three sampled days, 5–7 June 2026. Each aerodrome’s page adds 2025 and 2024, the same three days of the same month.

Hover a column heading for what it measures. Metrics has full definitions; click an aerodrome for its map and history.

NoteTier A (measured by APDF) and Tier B (estimated by NM)

The tier decides what can be measured.

Tier A (measured by APDF). The airport’s own records give the real times: off-block, take-off, landing, in-block. The taxi has exact bounds, so how much of it arrived is a measurement.

Tier B (estimated by NM). Network Manager gives an off-block time and a predicted taxi duration – an estimate, not a measured one. With no runway times, take-off is inferred, so only a median across a few hundred movements is worth reading.

There is no in-block time either, so nothing ends a taxi-in; NM’s arrival time is off-block plus predicted taxi plus predicted flight duration, adding nothing. Tier B therefore gets no arrival coverage, and the coverage index needs both sides.

The all-aerodromes table holds both, its taxi-out column filled throughout and asterisked where the window was measured.

One flight, scored

One real flight, each taxi cut into blocks: blue where reports arrived, red where none did. The airborne leg is compressed to keep the two taxis legible. How many blocks are covered is the flight’s real share; their spacing is not — the committed example tracks are decimated to 30 s, so where the gaps truly fell is what “Taxi-out spanned” answers, on the aerodrome pages.

	from	to	duration	expected total # reports (every 5s)	received	share
taxi-out	12:13:41	12:33:00	19.3 min (1,159 s)	232	154	0.664
taxi-in	14:34:00	14:39:40	5.7 min (340 s)	68	68	1.000

That is EDDF to EFHK, 6 June 2026. An aerodrome’s figure is the median of these across its flights, each side separately, so one badly received flight cannot move it. The coverage index multiplies the share seen at all by the average of the two medians.

Tier A (measured by APDF)

89 aerodromes with all four milestones on record: off-block, take-off, landing, in-block.

Ranked on the coverage index: share seen at all, times how much of a typical ground movement arrives.

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Every row and column, for 2026. Blanks are blank, not dashed, so a spreadsheet reads the column as numbers.

ⓘ#	ICAO	Aerodrome	Movements 2026 sample (3 days)	Coverage index	Coverage	Flights seen (%)	Tracking errors (%)
1	EBBR	Brussels Airport	1645	0.998	Excellent	99.8	11.4
2	LSZH	Zürich Airport	2365	0.996	Excellent	99.8	14.8
3	EICK	Cork International Airport	242	0.996	Excellent	99.6	12.3
4	EFHK	Helsinki Vantaa Airport	1253	0.989	Excellent	99.1	21.9
5	LEIB	Ibiza Airport	1031	0.985	Excellent	99.0	7.6
6	EDDS	Stuttgart Airport	756	0.984	Excellent	98.7	13.9
7	LFLL	Lyon Saint-Exupéry Airport	745	0.976	Excellent	100.0	3.5
8	LHBP	Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport	1220	0.975	Excellent	99.6	16.3
9	LFPO	Paris-Orly Airport	1935	0.971	Excellent	99.6	4.9
10	LPFR	Faro - Gago Coutinho International Airport	795	0.969	Excellent	100.0	5.8
11	ESSA	Stockholm-Arlanda Airport	1771	0.968	Excellent	97.1	11.4
12	ENVA	Trondheim Airport, Værnes	399	0.967	Excellent	99.5	16.1
13	LOWW	Vienna International Airport	2127	0.966	Excellent	99.8	11.1
14	LKPR	Václav Havel Airport Prague	1337	0.962	Excellent	99.2	8.8
15	EDDP	Leipzig/Halle Airport	451	0.961	Excellent	100.0	20.6
16	LPPT	Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport	1951	0.960	Excellent	99.8	7.2
17	EGGD	Bristol Airport	743	0.958	Excellent	100.0	24.9
18	EGNT	Newcastle International Airport	420	0.956	Excellent	99.8	19.4
19	EGCC	Manchester Airport	1915	0.949	Excellent	99.7	23.7
20	UGKO	David the Builder Kutaisi International Airport	89	0.947	Excellent	95.5	73.3
21	LGAV	Athens Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport	2685	0.940	Excellent	98.5	9.6
22	LMML	Malta International Airport	712	0.934	Excellent	99.6	12.5
23	LEZL	Seville Airport	624	0.932	Excellent	99.8	8.7
24	EGKK	London Gatwick Airport	2418	0.928	Excellent	99.9	18.5
25	LIMF	Turin Airport	366	0.927	Excellent	99.7	6.6
(64 more rows not shown)

Every aerodrome — Tier A (measured by APDF) and Tier B (estimated by NM)

All 352 aerodromes with at least 20 movements in 2026, both tiers together: seen-at-all is answerable everywhere, so this is its complete ranking.

The last column is taxi-out coverage for every one of them. An asterisk marks the 89 Tier A aerodromes, whose figure is measured against the airport’s own times; the other 263 are estimated against Network Manager’s predicted taxi, which is unbiased but loose enough that only the median means anything.

Four in five score exactly 0.000: outside airports with their own records, the network hears nothing from a grounded aircraft.

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Every row and column, for 2026. Blanks are blank, not dashed, so a spreadsheet reads the column as numbers.

ⓘ#	ICAO	Aerodrome	Movements 2026 sample (3 days)	Flights seen (%)	Times measured?	Track start vs take-off (min, median)	Track end vs landing (min, median)	Taxi-out received (median)
1	EGGW	London Luton Airport	1171	100.0	yes	0.8	5.0	0.000*
2	LPFR	Faro - Gago Coutinho International Airport	795	100.0	yes	-8.6	9.4	0.937*
3	LIPE	Bologna Guglielmo Marconi Airport	782	100.0	yes	0.9	4.4	0.000*
4	EGGD	Bristol Airport	743	100.0	yes	-9.8	9.8	0.917*
5	LFLL	Lyon Saint-Exupéry Airport	745	100.0	yes	-9.0	10.9	0.952*
6	EGPF	Glasgow Airport	651	100.0	no	-9.0	8.8	0.856
7	LBSF	Sofia Airport	596	100.0	no	0.3	7.6	0.000
8	LFBO	Toulouse-Blagnac Airport	528	100.0	yes	-8.3	9.4	0.845*
9	LFRS	Nantes Atlantique Airport	520	100.0	no	0.8	4.4	0.000
10	LGKR	Corfu Ioannis Kapodistrias International Airport	506	100.0	no	7.5	-5.5	0.000
11	EDDP	Leipzig/Halle Airport	451	100.0	yes	-12.0	11.6	0.922*
12	EGAA	Belfast International Airport	444	100.0	no	0.7	4.4	0.000
13	LIEE	Cagliari Elmas Airport	446	100.0	no	4.7	-1.7	0.000
14	EPWR	Copernicus Wrocław Airport	420	100.0	no	-11.4	8.9	0.826
15	DAAG	Houari Boumediene Airport	409	100.0	no	12.9	-11.7	0.000
16	EDDN	Nuremberg Airport	396	100.0	yes	-8.3	8.5	0.802*
17	EGNM	Leeds Bradford Airport	390	100.0	no	-9.5	8.6	0.875
18	DTTA	Tunis Carthage International Airport	389	100.0	no	10.8	-9.4	0.000
19	EHEH	Eindhoven Airport	377	100.0	no	0.3	4.5	0.000
20	LFOB	Beauvais-Tillé airport	342	100.0	no	1.2	2.2	0.000
21	LZIB	M. R. Štefánik Airport	337	100.0	yes	-8.7	9.0	0.848*
22	LIPX	Verona Villafranca Valerio Catullo Airport	328	100.0	no	1.7	2.3	0.000
23	EGLC	London City Airport	316	100.0	yes	-2.9	7.6	0.542*
24	LIRA	Ciampino–G. B. Pastine International Airport	299	100.0	yes	0.5	5.6	0.000*
25	EKBI	Billund Airport	290	100.0	no	0.7	4.4	0.000
(327 more rows not shown)

Where these aerodromes are

The outlined box is the ingested area, coloured by coverage band; grey means only detection was measurable. Aerodromes outside it don’t appear: never sampled, so a number for them would describe the boundary, not the receivers.

What “coverage” means here

Two questions, and the difference between them is what the site is about.

How much of its time on the ground was received? The taxi is bounded by real stand and runway times; we count how many of the expected 5-second reports arrived, where recorded. It varies a lot.

Was the flight seen at all? One position report between take-off and landing. Answerable everywhere, and above 99% almost everywhere, so it barely separates anything.

The coverage index multiplies the two. An aerodrome can score 99% on the second and near zero on the first: tracked in the air, invisible on the ground.

A third question sits between them: Network Manager’s predicted taxi duration gives aerodromes with no measured times a median estimated taxi-out share, the second table’s last column. Arrivals have no equivalent; no in-block time exists outside APDF.

What the ranking does not say

• An aerodrome outside the ingested area is absent, not ranked last; flights to it count at the European end.
• A low coverage index can have two causes, needing different fixes. Flights are cut from one continuous position stream per aircraft, with no marker between flights:
  • split: cut into several tracks and scored against the largest piece, so a departure’s track starts a median 6.5 minutes late and coverage is understated.
  • merged: two flights share one track; the other vanishes entirely. Merged movements are 0.8% of the sample; the survivor’s coverage barely shifts, but the vanished flight is missing, not undercounted.
  The tracking errors column adds split and merged together: high means both are happening, not a reception problem.
• The two tiers are never merged into one table.

The fleet

Every figure below counts movements in 2026, over the three sampled days.

How the aerodromes sit as a group: each row a measure, columns its spread — middle value, middle half, worst and best tenths.

Half receive less than a fifth of a typical taxi-out. The two “seen” rows stay near 100% for most, dropping to 87% only in the worst tenth, not the headline.

	metric	n	median	IQR	p10	p90
0	Taxi-out received — measured aerodromes	89	0.191	0.000 – 0.877	0.000	0.959
1	Taxi-in received — measured aerodromes	89	1.000	0.978 – 1.000	0.439	1.000
2	Coverage index — measured aerodromes	89	0.590	0.487 – 0.932	0.193	0.969
3	Flights seen — all aerodromes	352	99.7%	97.1% – 100.0%	87.0%	100.0%
4	Flights seen — aerodromes with measured times	89	99.7%	99.2% – 99.8%	95.9%	100.0%

Coverage index across the aerodromes with measured times. A smooth gradient means coverage varies continuously; a left tail means a small group of aerodromes is genuinely unreceived.

Detection rate across every ranked aerodrome — the share of ground-truth movements that got any track at all.