opensky-flight-tracker

name	opensky-flight-tracker
description	Use this skill when the user asks about live flight positions, aircraft tracking by callsign or flight number, or flights currently overhead a location. Trigger phrases: flight numbers (EK203, QR42, BA117), "where is my flight", "what's flying over me", "track flight", "is [flight] in the air", any aircraft callsign.
metadata	{"clawdbot":{"emoji":"✈️","requires":{"bins":["flight-tracker"]},"install":[{"id":"pip","kind":"pip","package":"flight-tracker-cli","bins":["flight-tracker"],"label":"Install flight-tracker-cli (pip)"}]}}

Flight Tracker Skill

No API key or setup required — works out of the box.

Commands

Track an aircraft by callsign

flight-tracker aircraft EK203
flight-tracker aircraft QR42 --format json
flight-tracker aircraft BAW117 --format summary

Shows live position, altitude, speed, heading, and vertical rate for a single aircraft. The aircraft must be currently airborne.

Callsign format: Always uppercase. OpenSky uses radio callsigns which usually match the ICAO airline prefix + flight number (e.g. EK203, QR42, BAW117). Note that the radio callsign may differ from the ticket flight number — for example, British Airways flight BA117 uses callsign BAW117.

Aircraft overhead a location

flight-tracker overhead --lat 25.2048 --lon 55.3657
flight-tracker overhead --lat 51.4775 --lon -0.4614 --radius 100
flight-tracker overhead --lat 40.6413 --lon -73.7781 --format json

Shows all airborne aircraft within a radius (default 50 km) of the given coordinates. Results sorted by altitude descending.

Rate Limits

The OpenSky free tier allows one request every 10 seconds. The CLI handles rate limiting automatically with exponential backoff retries (configurable via --retries).

Output Format

All commands default to --format summary which prints a human-readable table. Use --format json when piping output to another tool or agent — this outputs clean JSON to stdout with no extra decoration.

Global Options

• --retries N — Number of retries on failure (default: 3)
• --timeout N — Request timeout in seconds (default: 20)