Our story
Every flight has a story.
SkyMeter lets you replay it.
Most flight-tracking sites show where an aircraft went. SkyMeter tries to show what the flight was doing. Was the approach stable? Which runway did it use? Did it go around? Where did it touch down? Airlines have internal flight-analysis systems, and investigators have flight data recorders. Everyone else usually gets a line on a map. We thought that gap was too large.
What we believe
Aviation produces an extraordinary amount of public flight data every day. Aircraft position, altitude, groundspeed, vertical rate, squawk codes, airport context, runway geometry, weather, and route information can all be combined into something far more useful than a moving dot. SkyMeter exists to make that data understandable.
Pilots can review their own approaches. Instructors can build debriefs. Researchers can study airports, runways, and airspace behavior. Journalists can sanity-check public claims. Aviation enthusiasts can replay real flights in a way that feels closer to being there.
That's the whole idea: flight analytics should not be locked away from everyone curious enough to look.
What people use SkyMeter for
Personal debriefs
Pilots review recent flights: approach stability, touchdown point, descent profile, runway alignment, speed trends, crosswind context, and unusual events. A flight that felt "a little high" or "a little fast" can be reviewed later with a full replay and supporting data.
Instruction & research
Flight instructors use replay and approach data to explain flight profiles without burning aircraft time. Researchers and journalists search for flight events across airports, airlines, aircraft types, and time ranges: go-around rates, runway utilization, diversions, emergency squawks, holding patterns, and unusual operational trends.
Aviation discovery
SkyMeter also exists for people who simply love flight. Watching a heavy jet climb out, replaying a famous approach, searching for "go-arounds at JFK last week," or comparing arrivals into the same runway can be fascinating on its own.
How SkyMeter works
SkyMeter runs a continuously operating flight-data pipeline built for replay, search, and aviation analytics. Public flight traces are processed from global receiver networks and converted into structured flight records. Each record is cleaned, split into individual flights, matched to airports and runways, enriched with aircraft and route context, and joined with weather observations where available.
From there, SkyMeter derives the pieces that make a flight useful to study: flight phases such as climb, cruise, descent, approach, landing, and missed approach; runway alignment and likely runway usage; touchdown and rollout estimates; go-around and missed-approach events; approach stability gates; vertical, speed, and descent-rate behavior; emergency squawks and unusual flight paths; wind-aware speed and direction estimates where weather data supports them; and 3D replay attitude cues such as pitch, bank, and turn behavior.
Weather is a major part of understanding a flight. SkyMeter adds aviation weather and atmospheric context to flight records where suitable public data is available: METAR observations and larger-scale weather datasets used to estimate wind, temperature, pressure, and other conditions around the flight path. This helps explain things a simple ground track cannot: strong tailwinds, crosswinds on final, unusual groundspeed, high descent rates, holding behavior, and diversions. We use weather context to improve interpretation, not to pretend public data is the same as certified onboard instrumentation.
The result is not just a track line. It is an enriched replay record that can power a 3D viewer, cockpit-style instruments, airport dashboards, incident pages, search results, exports, and API access. If you want to know exactly how a particular detector works (go-arounds, approach scoring, attitude reconstruction), see the methodology and the FAQ. We try to be transparent about what's directly observed versus what's inferred.
Where we're going
The dial we're turning is more accessible, not more proprietary. SkyMeter uses public aviation data sources, and some source flight data is licensed under the Open Database License. Where required, SkyMeter provides attribution and makes qualifying processed replay data available under compatible terms. In plain terms: the underlying public data remains public where required; the paid product supports the expensive parts around it: global data processing, cleaning, enrichment, replay generation, weather processing, analytics, historical search, exports, API access, storage, bandwidth, and reliability.
SkyMeter is becoming a deeper post-flight analysis and aviation intelligence platform. On the roadmap: better general-aviation reconstruction, richer anomaly detection, stronger weather context, turbulence and icing proximity, improved airport and runway dashboards, and shareable post-flight analysis reports for pilots, instructors, researchers, journalists, and aviation teams. We are especially interested in feedback from people who fly, teach, dispatch, investigate, report on aviation, or build aviation software. If there is something you wish existed in a flight-analysis tool, we want to hear it.
Built by aviation people
SkyMeter was started in New York City by a small team working at the intersection of software engineering, aviation, data systems, and flight analysis. Our replay tools and event detectors are tested against real-world references, including pilot-provided flight logs, known flight events, published aviation safety criteria, airport and runway geometry, weather observations, and manual review.
SkyMeter is operated by Skymeter Aviation, LLC, a Delaware company with infrastructure designed for global flight-data processing. For questions, corrections, partnerships, integrations, or flight-data issues, write to [email protected]. A real person reads every message.
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