I don't think I've seen FlightAware showing aircraft tracks on the ground.
They do show taxi times for arriving/departing aircraft and I wonder if they are stitching that data together using the STDDS feed.
To give you an example, for an arriving aircraft you would get an alert of "wheels down", which is as literal as it sounds: a timestamped event when the aircraft made contact with the ground. In addition to ground position events (allowing the tracking you see here), you would also receive an alert when the aircraft left the tracked movement surface, i.e. transitioned to the gate/ramp area and no longer on an active airport surface.
(Pretty sure I have that correct, it's been awhile since I got back to my STDDS-powered projects. If anybody familiar with STDDS wants to chime in, please do!)
For the curious, all these "alerts" are JMS messages with XML payloads. Pretty much non-stop stream of data, incredibly fun if you're a developer+av geek. For FlightAware-style tracking without using any ADS-B you'll want to subscribe to the SFDPS feed. You'll get position updates every 60 sec for all airborne flights in the US, which last week amounted to ~40GB in my Postgres DB. You can request higher resolution reporting which is every 12s.
FA doesn't always show ground data (they must do some sort of filtering), but it is available via ADS-B. If you visit sites like www.adsbexchange.com or look at a receiver's raw data, you'll see ground data.
They do show taxi times for arriving/departing aircraft and I wonder if they are stitching that data together using the STDDS feed.
To give you an example, for an arriving aircraft you would get an alert of "wheels down", which is as literal as it sounds: a timestamped event when the aircraft made contact with the ground. In addition to ground position events (allowing the tracking you see here), you would also receive an alert when the aircraft left the tracked movement surface, i.e. transitioned to the gate/ramp area and no longer on an active airport surface.
(Pretty sure I have that correct, it's been awhile since I got back to my STDDS-powered projects. If anybody familiar with STDDS wants to chime in, please do!)
For the curious, all these "alerts" are JMS messages with XML payloads. Pretty much non-stop stream of data, incredibly fun if you're a developer+av geek. For FlightAware-style tracking without using any ADS-B you'll want to subscribe to the SFDPS feed. You'll get position updates every 60 sec for all airborne flights in the US, which last week amounted to ~40GB in my Postgres DB. You can request higher resolution reporting which is every 12s.