Does FLightAware and other flight data gathering companies/organizations have some type of exclusivity agreement with the FAA (government). It’s hard to imagine that the FAA would track flights in real time, allow a feed to businesses and not retain the results of that feed in a historical data repository. I work in IT and that just boggles my mind that a Government agency (heck anyone) would not accumulate that data. I’ve seen FAA produced maps of flight path accumulations over time. It can’t be possible to produce that type of illustration without a dataset behind it. Do they have an account with FlightAware and are buying back their own data? That would sound about right for the government now that I think about it. LOL
