Data Sources Behind AeroCopilot (61 Pipelines)
AeroCopilot ingests 61 government and authoritative aviation data sources across weather, charts, compliance, safety, airport ops, and environmental feeds.
Data Sources Behind AeroCopilot (61 Pipelines)
Every weather call, NOTAM lookup, airworthiness check, and route warning that AeroCopilot surfaces is grounded in an upstream government feed. Sixty-one of them are catalogued, and 56 have active ingestion behind them. The remaining five are listed anyway, marked as announced-but-not-yet-ingested, because a gap you can read is worth more than a catalog that looks complete.
This page is the entry point for understanding what flows into the platform, who issues each feed, and why each one matters to a flight. The full machine-readable catalog drives the public /data-sources directory and is ranked by cadence on the /data-leaderboard.
The six categories
Sources are grouped by operational role. Counts are taken directly from the catalog at apps/web/lib/seo/data-sources-catalog.ts.
| Category | Count | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Weather | 13 | METAR, TAF, SIGMET, G-AIRMET, PIREP, winds/temps aloft, SPC convective outlook, SPC watches, NWS public alerts (CAP), NHC tropical cyclones, SWPC space weather, NWS area forecast discussions, DAFS GTG turbulence |
| Charts | 8 | VFR sectionals, terminal area charts, IFR low/high enroutes, instrument approach procedures, CIFP, chart supplement, AIRAC cycle schedule |
| Compliance | 15 | 14 CFR, SFAR No. 120 (14 CFR Part 194), 49 USC §44809, advisory circulars, FAA orders, AIM, airworthiness directives, aircraft registry, airman registry, Part 135 operators, Part 145 repair stations, Part 141 flight schools, TFRs, NOTAMs, airspace boundaries |
| Safety | 7 | NTSB accident database, FAA wildlife strikes, CFIT hot spots, FAA airport hot spots, mountain obscuration, CIP/FIP icing, G-AIRMET turbulence |
| Airport Ops | 10 | FAA airport status, D-ATIS, preferred IFR routes, FAA Digital Obstacle File, UAS Facility Maps, ADS-B traffic, NOAA tide predictions, NDBC buoys, USNO sun & moon times, FAA weather cameras |
| Other | 8 | EPA AirNow AQI, NOAA HMS smoke plumes, NIFC wildfire activity, NWS international SIGMETs (which carry the volcanic-ash hazard), Nav Canada METAR/TAF, NWS MOS, NWS Center Weather Advisories, NWS Meteorological Impact Statements |
Total: 61 sources, of which 56 have active ingestion. The five without it are chart-supplement, hot-spots and cfit (announced, no pipeline built), plus repair-stations and flight-schools — those two are loaded by our operators from the FAA records rather than by a scheduled job, so they are counted as ingested but carry no refresh interval.
Who issues these feeds
Issuing agencies in the catalog include the FAA, NOAA, NWS, NTSB, EPA, USGS, USNO, NIFC, Nav Canada, and AeroCopilot's own derived layers. (The count is deliberately not stated here: the previous version said "nine" and listed nine while the catalog carried twelve agency values, and a census in prose goes stale the first time an entry moves.)
Two things this section used to claim that are not true and are worth naming. First, some feeds reach us through a NON-AGENCY relay rather than from the agency directly — D-ATIS via a community relay, NWS MOS via a university mesonet, Nav Canada observations via the NOAA Aviation Weather Center — so "no hidden re-publishers in the pipeline" was wrong; each such entry discloses its relay. Second, the FAA Part 145 and Part 141 directories mix FAA certificate records with listings submitted through our own self-service forms, so those two are not a single-agency feed.
For each source, the catalog records the issuing agency, expected refresh cadence, plain-English description, what AeroCopilot ingests from it, how the platform uses it, the related product features that depend on it, and (where public) the upstream API URL.
How fresh the data is
Refresh cadences range from 60 seconds (ADS-B traffic) to 56 days (VFR chart cycles). The slowest thing on the ladder is a chart cycle, not the CFIT hot-spot set — that one is catalogued but not ingested, so it has no cadence at all and is not ranked. ADS-B is the single fastest source, and it is a 60-second poll rather than a stream — no upstream AeroCopilot ingests publishes faster than once a minute, so no source here is fresher than that. Below ADS-B, the fastest tier — METAR observations, TFRs, NOTAMs, FAA airport status, NWS public alerts — refreshes every 5 to 10 minutes. The slowest tier covers reference datasets that the FAA itself only publishes on the 28-day or 56-day AIRAC cycle.
Live cron schedules for every refresh job live in apps/cron-worker/cron-jobs.ts (they were in index.ts when this page was written) and in the shared registry packages/shared/src/cron-schedules.ts; they are documented in detail in Freshness and Refresh Cycles.
Why this matters for flying
The catalog is not marketing furniture. Every AI Copilot answer, every briefing, every map overlay, and every airport directory page cites the upstream source it pulled from. When the FAA changes the obstacle file on a Tuesday, the AeroCopilot map reflects the new obstacle on the next AIRAC ingest — and the source page tells you exactly when that ingest ran.
That traceability is what makes the system defensible. A briefing PDF generated from these sources is acceptable evidence in a Letter of Investigation review because each row points back to the FAA, NWS, or NTSB feed that produced it.
How to explore
- The
/data-sourcespublic directory lists all 61 sources with badges for agency and cadence, and marks the ones we do not ingest. - The
/data-leaderboardranks only the sources on a refresh clock; everything else appears in a separate table with the reason it has none. - Each source has a dedicated page at
/data-sources/[id]explaining which features depend on it and which AI tools cite it. - The
/data-leaderboardpage ranks the catalog by refresh frequency. - For the underlying source-attribution model used by the AI Copilot, see Source Attribution and Transparency Layer.