Flight Tracker Skill#

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

Commands#

Track an aircraft by callsign#

bash

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#

bash

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)