The Open Performance Data Initiative: A Foundation Supporting the European Open Science Alliance for ATM Research

There exists an abundance of challenges for the current and future air transport. A highly efficient air navigation system will be a key enabler to meet the political and – especially – the environmental targets. In order to demonstrate progress and validate claims and performance benefits it will be essential to independently reproduce and verify results. Previous research identified ‘open data’ as a key ingredient and postulated a roadmap towards an Open Science Alliance. One of the first stepping stones is the Open Performance Data Initiative. As a first step of the initiative, a conceptual trajectory reduction approach was applied. With a focus on the European context, this resulted in comprehensive datasets containing flight events, associated measurements, and flight lists, covering 33.9 million flights based on publicly available crowd-sourced ADS-B data, from January 2022 to July 2024. An initial quantitative comparison between airport traffic and operations, as monitored by EUROCONTROL and the established open datasets, reveals a high degree of consistency in trends and its suitability for supporting research and day-to-day performance monitoring. The research also showed that vertical flight inefficiency for arrivals is currently underestimated based on data granularity. The work presented in this paper builds a foundation for the proposed Open Science Alliance roadmap. Further continued development and expansion of the flight list, available flight events and measurements, will provide a more comprehensive access for reproducible and open research.