Opensky MCP server

OpenSky MCP

Live aircraft positions and airspace-activity summaries, keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1679+ live data sources.

Auth

None. No key, no signup.

What this pack actually calls

Not OpenSky. OpenSky Network blackholes datacenter egress — the connection hangs with no response and no reset, from Cloudflare Workers and from a non-CF relay alike, with valid OAuth2 credentials. It works from a residential IP, which is what makes it look fixable; it is not, and credentials do not change it. Do not spend time trying again.

The tools keep the OpenSky names because that is what agents reach for, and serve the same live picture from the keyless community ADS-B mirrors: adsb.lol → airplanes.live → adsb.fi, tried in that order. Every response carries a source field naming the mirror that answered and a note saying the data is not OpenSky's.

State vectors are returned in OpenSky's field names and units — metres and m/s, not readsb's feet and knots — so code written against the OpenSky shape keeps working rather than silently misreading altitudes.

Tools

Two of these names are also exported by other packs (country-state-city has its own getstates; flights and adsb both have getaircraft), so on the full catalog the gateway exposes this pack's as opensky_*. The middle column is what you actually call there. On a scoped connection — /opensky/mcp — the bare names work, because there is nothing to collide with.

What is not available, and why

Historical endpoints. The community mirrors are live-only, and OpenSky is the only source of "which airports did this aircraft fly between last Tuesday". get_flights therefore returns found: false with a reason rather than answering a past-window question with a live snapshot.

There is no global "every aircraft right now" query either — the mirrors serve a circle around a point, so get_states needs either an icao24 filter or a location. Called with neither, it says so and gives the arguments to retry with.

Coverage caveats

airspace_activity undercounts non-civilian traffic. Read it as a civilian-aviation normalcy signal, not an order of battle.

• Receiver-based. Mid-ocean, and areas with few ground receivers, are thin.
• Military and state aircraft routinely disable transponders, so

coverage: "partial", and their counts are a floor, not a total.

• Regions larger than the feeds can cover in one pass report

allocated by country of registration — it is not transmitted by the aircraft. Only blocks confirmed against live registrations are mapped (validated at 1,125 aircraft agreeing, 0 conflicts); anything else reports unknown rather than guessing.

• origin_country is derived from the ICAO 24-bit address block, which is

Related

getarrivals / getdepartures (live airport activity inferred from ADS-B)

• flights — getflightroute (callsign → airline and route),

• adsb — the same mirror chain with readsb-native field names and units
• aviation-weather — METAR/TAF/SIGMET for the airports involved
• faa-delays — FAA ground stops and delay programs for US airports

Data sources

• https://api.adsb.lol
• https://api.airplanes.live
• https://opendata.adsb.fi

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.