About runwayinuse

An inference engine that estimates which runway is in use at an airport by fusing D-ATIS, METAR wind, observed ADS-B traffic, NOTAM closures, and learned local convention — and says we don't know when it doesn't.

Not for navigation

Everything on this site is advisory situational awareness only. It is not an operational source, and it must never substitute for ATIS, AWOS, CTAF, or ATC instructions. Data can be wrong, stale, or missing; probabilities are estimates.

Privacy

• No accounts. The only cookie is fav, a functional cookie holding the airport codes you starred, stored in your browser for one year. No tracking cookies, no third-party scripts, and no advertising or analytics network of any kind.
• What is counted. The server keeps a running tally of how many times each kind of page was served each day — "the state directory, 12 times today" — along with the referring host if your browser sent one. No IP addresses, no visitor or session identity, and nothing that could reconstruct one person's path through the site. It is a counter, not a record of you.
• The "was this right?" feedback stores the report plus a one-way hash of your connection fingerprint used solely for rate-limiting; no IP address is stored.
• Aircraft privacy: aircraft enrolled in the FAA's LADD program or flying PIA identities are anonymized at ingest — their registration and callsign are never stored or displayed. Operations by those aircraft still count as anonymous evidence.

Data sources & attribution

• Airport/runway data: FAA NASR 28-day subscription (public domain).
• Weather: NWS/FAA aviationweather.gov (public domain). Coded METAR wind (true-referenced) only.
• D-ATIS: FAA SWIM, via the datis.clowd.io relay.
• ADS-B: community aggregators (adsb.lol, adsb.fi, airplanes.live traces). Their data is contributed by volunteer receiver operators.

Accessibility

The site aims for WCAG 2.1 AA: semantic HTML, ARIA on interactive widgets, sufficient color contrast, no color-only meaning, and full keyboard operation. Answer pages auto-refresh about every 75 seconds so the data stays current; if that interferes with assistive technology, the JSON API serves the identical answer without any refresh. Accessibility problem? Please report it — it's a bug.