A Month of DAY. All 2 399 flights in February 2025 to or from Dayton, Ohio (DAY/KDAY).
Flight data provided by AeroAPI • Basemap © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap (Improve this map)
Dayton (DAY) is my home airport, and I wanted to visualize where aircraft using DAY fly. I collected a month of flight track data over the month of February 2025, and created a map of all flights to or from DAY. Brighter green on the map indicates more flights.
Overall, 2 399 flights flew into or out of DAY from 1–28 February. Chicago O’Hare (ORD) had the most flights (399 total flights; 202 from DAY–ORD and 197 from ORD–DAY), which is not surprising—it’s a hub for both American and United, and less than an hour’s flight from Dayton.
Data Sources and Tools Used
Flight data was sourced from FlightAware’s AeroAPI. I wrote a Python script (download_airport_tracks.py) to get a list of flights using GET /airports/{id}/flights, download each of those flights’ tracks using GET /flights/{id}/track, and save each track as a record in a GeoPackage file.
(Because I’m on the Personal tier of AeroAPI, I can only get the past 10 days of flight data at the time of the query. Thus, I ran my Python script every few days to cover the entire month of February. To avoid duplicate tracks and duplicate track query fees, my script checked whether a flight was already in the GeoPackage before requesting the track.)
I used QGIS to create the map, setting the flight tracks layer to have a transparency and glow so that the map became brighter the more tracks were in a given area.