FlightAware keeps its eyes on the skies
Houston-based tech company is collecting flight data to make traveling more efficient
AHouston flight tracking company is quietly raising data standards for the aviation industry which could help improve efficiency for major airlines — and in turn lower costs for travelers.
Since 2005 FlightAware has been helping people track flights and check airport conditions with its free app and website. Today, FlightAware is the world’s largest flight tracking platform, according to the company.
And while the company is known for its free app, FlightAware makes money by continuing to refine how it collects flight data, and then selling that aviation data to airlines, airports and other interested companies. In fact, the company became so good at collecting flight data it caught the attention of Collins Aerospace, which bought FlightAware in 2021.
“I think of us as providing decisiomaking tools for more efficient operations,” said FlightAware president James Sulak. “And that’s a lot of what they (Collins Aerospace) were trying to do, and they have a huge suite of software and messaging applications that airlines use. We can start plugging in our data — foresight, predictive times — into that and help make those products better, and that ultimately makes aviation more efficient and more reliable.”
Collins Aerospace supplies aerospace and defense products for commercial and business aviation, military and defense, airports, and other industries. It’s a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies, a multinational company that researches and manufactures advanced technology products, also for the defense and aerospace industries. Raytheon is a major contractor with the Department of Defense.
Before catching the attention of Collins, FlightAware started as a small Houston company founded by Daniel Baker, a commercial pilot and technology entrepreneur. Baker’s startup quickly took off, and today has millions of daily users and a weekly newsletter reaching more than 10 million people, according to the company.
Flight tracking is not just a way for travelers to check on potential delays — airplane spotting is a hobby that’s attracted enthusiasts for more than a century. Technology has made it easier through the years as planes started to transmit things like location and altitude by way of radio signals. As the technology evolved it became increasingly valuable to other industries, mainly military and defense.
FlightAware has gotten particularly good at collecting flight data from a range of sources, starting in 2005 with mostly federal data, and then expanding out to collecting information from other satellite technology, and even deploying some of their own systems so flight tracking enthusiasts can gather data that’s sent back to the company. The company now uses more than 45 different government air traffic control and private data sources, according to FlightAware.
Safety is also a big reason for flight tracking, made evident by high profile plane disappearances like Malaysia Airlines flight 370 that went missing in 2014 while on route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. All 239 people on board the flight are presumed dead, and the exact location of the plane is unknown to this day.
The disappearance triggered the most expensive airplane search in history, with multiple countries helping with the investigation. New international standards for tracking planes over water were also adopted. In 2020 the U.S. started requiring most airplanes to include what’s called automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) transmitters to send out satellite navigation information.
FlightAware has a global network of ADS-B receivers, operating hundreds of them in partnership with airports. The compa
ny also designs, builds, and sells network ADS-B receivers that send flight data back to the company over any available internet connection. The company will provide the receivers to professional users with an appropriate facility, and also sells them to the public for less than $100. Sulak estimates the company has about 34,000 of them around the world.
Sulak, a Rice University graduate, started at FlightAware a decade ago as a software engineer. He said when he joined the company he was one of the few software engineers among the staff of 30. He was in the right place at the right time, he said, moving quickly into a leadership role on the web development team and then becoming the vice president of engineering.
When Collins Aerospace bought FlightAware last year, the company founder shifted out of the CEO role and into a position as an adviser at Collins. Sulak was named leader of FlightAware.
“It’s definitely been a transition — a lot more spreadsheets these days,” Sulak said with a laugh, quickly following up with, “It’s great. This is a direction I’ve always wanted to move more into, not just an engineering role, but a broader business operations role.”
Sulak, a dad to three small kids who enjoys cycling and photography in addition to software engineering, now serves not only as president but also as general manager of the 150 employee company. While chatting in his office, looking out the window of FlightAware’s 29th floor headquarters in Greenway Plaza, Sulak credits company culture for contributing to his rise to the top.
“One principle of how we work has always been continuous education,” Sulak said. “And we do a lot of work with leadership training.”
Sulak said Collins Aerospace liked how FlightAware operated, and Collins provided opportunities for existing FlightAware workers to advance in the company.
“They trusted us to continue leading the vision and the product development and the engineering,” Sulak said.
Now that FlightAware is part of Collins, he said, there’s even more opportunities for individual growth. When FlightAware was still a small company there was a limit to career advancement opportunities, but Sulak said that’s no longer the case now that it’s part of Collins — which has not only more opportunities and programs, but is also continuing FlightAware’s goal of providing continuing education for staff.
The company already has a good reputation with travelers and airlines, Sulak said, and he expects to leverage that good track record to get FlightAware data and services in front of more people and companies. Being part of a bigger company like Collins will only help with that mission, he said.
While FlightAware is known for tracking aircraft as they fly through the sky, the company is working next on improving its tracking of planes on the ground. When multiple airplanes are in close vicinity, like at an airport, it’s harder to pick up individual transmissions. Sulak said his team is researching and developing ways to better track and predict airplane taxiing time, which in turn could help airlines save on things like jet fuel while also improving the experience for customers.
Additionally, Sulak said the company is figuring out what to do with the data it’s collected over the years it’s been in operation. Right now when people ask FlightAware for historical analysis of flight data, it’s treated as a custom data report the company sells, but Sulak hopes to change that.
“We’re sitting on this huge trove of, in some cases, 17 years or more of flight data,” he said. “It’s not as accessible as we want it to be...we want to make that available via query so people can do more interesting things with it.”