Project
About
FlyItalyADSB is Italy's first ADS-B flight tracking community. Born from a group of aviation enthusiasts, it has grown into a data collection infrastructure with global coverage and applications in scientific research.
History
FlyItalyADSB was founded as a community of flight tracking enthusiasts in Italy. The network expanded progressively across the country — from the Alps to Sicily, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic coast — with receivers covering up to 400 km each. Over time, the feeder community grew beyond Italy to include receivers across Europe and beyond, giving FlyItalyADSB a genuinely global ground network.
Following the acquisition of ADS-B Exchange by JETNET (private equity), the non-profit tracking community fragmented. FlyItalyADSB maintained its independence and positioned itself alongside new community players such as adsb.lol, adsb.fi and airplanes.live — all based on the same open source stack, all non-profit, all unfiltered.
Coverage is global: beyond the ground network, the aggregation server receives data from adsb.lol and theairtraffic.com, extending the map worldwide. Italian MLAT remains a unique feature: FlyItalyADSB is the only network with active MLAT triangulation over Italy, including military flights.
Mode-S data collected by the network became the foundation of the Weather 3.2 meteorological research project, which uses aircraft as high-altitude wind sensors to validate ERA5 reanalyses and IASI profiles.
Infrastructure
Nesso Labs
FlyItalyADSB's infrastructure — Kubernetes cluster, distributed storage, data pipelines — is managed by Nesso Labs. FlyItalyADSB is the first "Nesso Data" project in the airspace mobility domain: collection, processing and distribution of public data — the same philosophy as the Nesso Equity project in the financial domain.
Contact
Research inquiries
Access to historical datasets, raw Mode-S data, MLAT CSV — for university or institutional research.
[email protected]GitHub
Source code for custom components: readsb fork, mlat-server, flarm-ogn-to-sbs.
github.com/flyitalyadsb ↗For general questions, feeder setup support or other requests, see the Contact us page — we respond within 48 hours.