[route3]

HN'ers might appreciate learning the FAA has a developer-friendly program called SWIM [0] to help facilitate getting realtime FAA data (flight plans, weather data, etc) in to the hands of coders. I recently attended the SWIM Developer Workshop at the Volpe Center (near MIT) and really enjoyed it.

There's quite a bit to the SWIM program. The onboarding can be a bit tricky though and you have to know your way around site-to-site VPNs. I recently completed the onboarding process and am receiving live flight plan data -- proposed flights, en route, completed etc.

Would be curious to know if there are others on HN that are working with SWIM data or if there are companies that are hiring in this space.

[0] http://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/swim/

[wrigby]

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the differences between using SWIM vs a commercial product like FlightAware. From my cursory glance at SWIM, it seems like it's probably better for getting flight plans and weather info, but FlightAware may be more useful for getting in-flight status. Does that seem consistent with your experience?

[sokoloff]

Not a SWIM developer, but it looks like SWIM is the way to get a data feed to allow you build a flightaware workalike.

[wrigby]

Makes sense. I know FlightAware operates their own network of ADS-B receivers, which augments the FAA data. I should look into whether or not that changes things, but I imagine the SWIM data feed doesn't have many holes.