How MotionInfo Aero operations counts are produced, what they include, and what they do not. Written for the airport managers, planning consultants, and FAA reviewers who need to cite this data in master plans, Part 150 studies, and AIP grant justifications.
MotionInfo operates receivers installed on the airfield that record ADS-B (1090 MHz Extended Squitter) transmissions directly from aircraft. Position reports are processed into discrete arrival and departure operations using the airport’s runway and airport-zone geometry. Where available, FAA SWIM-derived air-traffic data supplements direct reception; each operation records its source. Every operation carries a local and UTC timestamp and, where determinable, the runway used, and is joined to FAA registry and aircraft-characteristics data (type, approach category, design group, weight, engine type).
Data collection at most sites began between 2018 and 2023 depending on installation date. Counts are retained indefinitely, so multi-year trend and forecast baselines use identical methodology across years.
No — and this is the most important limitation to understand. ADS-B Out is required by 14 CFR 91.225 only in rule airspace (Class A/B/C, above 10,000 ft MSL, and certain other areas). At many general aviation airports outside rule airspace, some aircraft — older aircraft without electrical systems, gliders, some agricultural and antique aircraft — operate legally without ADS-B Out and are not observed. MotionInfo counts are therefore a verified floor, not an estimate that can overstate activity. For planning purposes this is a conservative property: actual activity is at least what we report. Industry studies at towered fields typically find ADS-B equipage of 80–95%+ of powered fixed-wing activity; equipage at any specific airport can be assessed by comparing a sample period against manual or tower counts.
All sites receive 1090 MHz Extended Squitter. UAT (978 MHz, permitted below 18,000 ft in the U.S.) reception is deployed at select sites. At airports without UAT reception, UAT-only aircraft are counted only when they appear in supplementary FAA data. If your fleet includes significant UAT-only equipage, ask us about the UAT reception status at your site before citing fleet-mix percentages.
Aircraft flying under the FAA’s Privacy ICAO Address program or using third-party call signs (e.g. FLT/DCM-style flight IDs) broadcast valid ADS-B and are counted as operations. Their identity may not resolve to the FAA registry, so type, weight class, and design-group enrichment for those operations may appear as “Unknown.” Reports disclose Unknown categories explicitly rather than redistributing them. The operations count itself is unaffected by privacy programs.
No. LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) governs FAA redistribution of flight data; it does not alter what an aircraft broadcasts over the air. Directly received ADS-B transmissions from LADD-listed aircraft are recorded and counted. MotionInfo does not currently apply any identity suppression or filtering to aircraft shown in its products; publicly embeddable displays show the same traffic picture a hobbyist receiver would observe.
ADS-B has no tower count sheet, so local operations are estimated: an operation is classified local when the same airframe’s departure is followed by its arrival at the same airport within 60 minutes, which captures touch-and-go and traffic-pattern work (each circuit counts as two operations, consistent with FAA counting practice). A fast round-robin to a nearby field inside 60 minutes would be misclassified as local, and pattern work by non-equipped aircraft is missed entirely, so the split should be treated as an estimate and is labeled as such in every report.
Runway used is determined geometrically from the track’s intersection with runway rectangles. Attribution requires adequate low-altitude coverage of the final/initial segment, and is currently available for roughly half of operations fleet-wide (the exact rate varies by site geometry and antenna installation). Every report that presents runway-use percentages states the attribution rate for that airport and period, and percentages are always computed over runway-attributed operations only.
Night is 10:00 pm–6:59 am local time, matching the DNL night-weighting window used in 14 CFR Part 150 noise exposure modeling. Timestamps are recorded in the airport’s local time zone including daylight saving transitions.
The Airport Manager console produces grant-packet counts from the same AeroOps table as Master Planning:
OPERATIONS_OVERFLIGHT.FAA 5010 operations buckets (air carrier, air taxi, GA local, GA itinerant, military) are derived from the military flag, operator/cert data when present, and the local/itinerant estimate. These counts are for 5010, ALP, and grant packets. They are not landing-fee invoices and are not sold as ADS-B billing.
Subscribed manager history and date-range replay read archived Report.AeroOps and
Report.TRACKS. That is independent of the live-map host’s typical 7-day terms-and-conditions
cache. Track overlay is limited to a 48-hour window per request so the spatial scan stays bounded; the
operations event log can cover the selected range (capped at 366 days for the grant-packet aggregation).
Noise investigation also unions Report.TRACKS_OVERFLIGHT so a geofence shows transits that never
operated at the field, and returns the full intersecting track (not only the in-fence samples).
An overnight stay is an arrival whose next departure of the same airframe is on a later calendar day. Days-on-field is the sum of those nights in the selected range. Aircraft with 30 or more nights, or 6 or more overnight stays, are flagged as 5010 based-aircraft candidates and rolled up as single-engine, multi-engine, jet, helicopter, military, or other. The flag supplements the airport’s manual based-aircraft roster; it is an estimate and is labeled as such. Airframes without a registration are still counted using their ICAO24 hex. ADS-B days-seen / overnight stays are candidates only — they are not FAA-accepted 5010 based-aircraft counts, are never written into an official 5010 field, and the app does not auto-file Form 5010.
The subscriber 5010 workbench (/secure/workbench5010.cfm) gathers FAA-grade planning
inputs in one place: NASR / airport reference (NOAA/NWS Aviation Weather Center
https://aviationweather.gov/api/data/airport, FAA-sourced, plus
cached Report.Facilities / Report.Runways), current METAR from the same public AWC
feed (with a single latest Report.METAR row as fallback — not the Reports weather-tab
aggregations), a releasable FAA MASTER / AircraftDetails N-number lookup as a workbench aid (not a
billing join), the Manager 5010 operations buckets, and the candidate-vs-official disclaimer panel. TFMSC and
other official FAA traffic-count products are not loaded from this repo and are not shown.
The public noise_embed.cfm form is intake only. The Manager console Noise tab geocodes an address
(or accepts lat/lng), draws a nautical-mile geofence, and overlays archived tracks that intersect that fence
from Report.TRACKS and Report.TRACKS_OVERFLIGHT. Existing complaints on the Noise
page have an Investigate link that opens the same tool for that address and event dates.
FAA critical aircraft determinations (AC 150/5000-17) require the critical aircraft — or a grouping of aircraft with similar design characteristics (approach speed, wingspan, tail height, gear configuration, pavement loading) — to make regular use of the airport, defined as at least 500 annual operations, counting local and itinerant but excluding touch-and-go. One operation is a single takeoff or a single landing.
Because the threshold is about the most demanding aircraft in regular use — not simply the most frequent — our report presents two views. A by-type table flags each aircraft type whose regular-use (non–touch-and-go) operations reach 500. A by-ARC-group table groups aircraft by Airport Reference Code (Approach Category + Airplane Design Group) — the standard "similar characteristics" grouping — and flags each group reaching 500. The airport's Critical / Design ARC is then the composite of the most demanding approach category and design group among the groups in regular use (which may come from different aircraft, per FAA practice). This is what drives runway, taxiway, safety-area, pavement, and AIP design decisions — so a light single such as a Cessna 172 is not the critical aircraft merely because it is the most common, if a group of more demanding aircraft (say business jets) also reaches regular use. We detect touch-and-go as rapid same-aircraft operation pairs (a landing and immediate takeoff within ~2 minutes) and exclude them from the threshold count. Unidentified aircraft are never flagged.
Reports and CSV exports are generated from the same operations table used by the live dashboards, carry generation dates, and can be regenerated on demand for verification. We are happy to speak directly with your planning consultant or FAA district office about methodology — contact support@motioninfo.com or +1 (401) 247-7780.