Analyzing Real-time Flight Streaming Data with Snowflake | Real-time Data Summit 2024

Explore the power of Real-time flight data streaming with Adrienne Watts, VP of Data & Analytics at Moser Consulting. Try Aerospike Cloud for free: https://auth.control.aerospike.cloud/...

In this comprehensive session, Adrienne Watts takes you into the world of real-time flight data processing, offering expert insights into how the aviation industry is leveraging modern data platforms like Snowflake and ADS-B technology to revolutionize flight tracking, air traffic control, and commercial aviation analytics.

🎯 What You'll Learn in This Video

What is ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) and why it's transforming how aircraft are tracked across the globe

The critical role of data sources such as TC Radar, SWIM (System Wide Information Management), and NextGen

How ADS-B improves pilot situational awareness, enhances air traffic control, and enables collision avoidance

The environmental benefits of ADS-B, including its role in reducing carbon emissions through more efficient routing

Real-world use cases and technical challenges from a client in the aviation industry working with 92,000+ daily flights and 20 million+ data records per day

Why Snowflake was chosen for this project, and how Snowpipe Streaming delivers low-latency, high-throughput, and exactly-once delivery for real-time aviation data

How aviation hobbyists use Raspberry Pi setups to contribute to crowdsourced ADS-B data networks

A look into how metadata management, data quality rules, and data lineage tracking are essential to real-time data integration

🛫 What Is ADS-B and Why Does It Matter?
ADS-B is a modern aircraft surveillance technology where planes broadcast their GPS location, altitude, speed, and heading every half-second automatically and openly. With this real-time transmission, pilots, other aircraft, and air traffic control can instantly receive updated positions, vastly improving airspace visibility and safety. It’s now the FAA’s preferred surveillance method and is used globally, including space-based ADS-B via Iridium satellites for coverage over oceans and remote areas.

🌍 Environmental and Operational Impact
By using more precise, real-time surveillance with ADS-B, aircraft can fly closer together, at optimized speeds and altitudes, resulting in reduced fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions. Between 2020–2030, researchers estimate that 14.3 million metric tons of CO₂ could be prevented with expanded ADS-B coverage in oceanic and remote airspaces.

🏢 Real-World Case Study: Aviation Industry Client Using Snowflake
Adrienne shares a detailed case study of a company in the aviation sector that needed to ingest and process real-time flight data. Their original .NET and on-premises system was slow, error-prone, and unscalable. Moser Consulting re-architected the solution using Snowflake, leveraging Snowpipe Streaming and a trusted-raw-refined data architecture for robust ingestion and transformation of ADS-B, TFMS, and SFDPS data streams.

With Snowflake’s scalability, cost efficiency, and integration with cloud services, the client achieved:

Real-time insights and analytics

Elimination of failed jobs and out-of-order messages

A high-performance backend serving reporting, data visualizations, and customer-facing web applications

A secure, compliant, and auditable data pipeline

🔧 Technologies Covered

Snowflake

Snowpipe & Snowpipe Streaming

ADSB (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast)

SWIM (System Wide Information Management)

NextGen ATC technologies

Honeycomb Analytics

Raspberry Pi & crowdsourced data collection

FAA public datasets

Data validation, cleansing, and transformation best practices

🎯 Use Cases for ADS-B and Flight Data

Real-time flight tracking and delay prediction

Airspace and runway optimization

Post-flight performance analysis

Fleet management for airlines

Ground operations planning for airports

Air cargo tracking and logistics

Public tracking of VIP/private aircraft

Aviation research and analytics

Whether you're in the aviation sector, work in data engineering, or are simply fascinated by how real-time data powers the skies, this session offers deep insights into streaming architecture, data quality strategies, and the transformative impact of ADSB and Snowflake in real-world aviation applications.

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