Opensky

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

Tool	Call it as	Returns
get_states	opensky_get_states	Live state vectors, filtered by icao24 or by lat/lon/radius_nm
get_aircraft	opensky_get_aircraft	Where one aircraft is right now, by ICAO24 hex
get_flights	get_flights	Historical flight legs — not available, returns an explicit not-available result naming what does work
airspace_activity	airspace_activity	Aircraft count, country breakdown, altitude and airborne split over a named region

Two of these names are also exported by other packs (country-state-city has its own get_states; flights and adsb both have get_aircraft), 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

• Receiver-based. Mid-ocean, and areas with few ground receivers, are thin.
• Military and state aircraft routinely disable transponders, so airspace_activity undercounts non-civilian traffic. Read it as a civilian-aviation normalcy signal, not an order of battle.
• Regions larger than the feeds can cover in one pass report coverage: "partial", and their counts are a floor, not a total.
• origin_country is derived from the ICAO 24-bit address block, which is 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.

Related

• flights — get_flight_route (callsign → airline and route), get_arrivals / get_departures (live airport activity inferred from ADS-B)
• 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.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "opensky": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/opensky/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/opensky/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1679+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/opensky_get_states \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"lat":51.47,"lon":-0.45,"radius_nm":50}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/opensky_get_states. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "opensky": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-opensky"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-opensky

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Opensky data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT