Archived · April 2026
Runways In Use
A real-time service that parsed D-ATIS broadcasts to report the active runway configuration at U.S. airports.
This project has been retired. The live API and dashboard at runwaysinuse.com were shut down in April 2026. The snapshot below is a frozen view of the dashboard captured moments before shutdown; runway configurations shown are not current.
About
What it did
Runway direction information isn't published in any structured aviation data API. Pilots and controllers get it from D-ATIS — a plain-text broadcast, updated every few minutes, describing weather, NOTAMs, and which runways are in use for arrivals and departures. The phrasing varies by airport and by controller.
This project polled D-ATIS for every major U.S. airport every five minutes, parsed the free-form text, and exposed a clean API (and dashboard) answering a single question: which runways are in use right now?
Architecture
How it worked
A hybrid parser combined hand-written regex patterns with a fine-tuned T5-small language model. The regex layer handled standard phraseology; the ML model handled everything else. Low-confidence parses were routed to a human review queue, and corrections were fed back into the training set.
Totals at retirement
By the numbers
- 96.4%Parser accuracy
- 3.8MATIS broadcasts parsed
- 1.1MRunway configurations
- ~100U.S. airports covered
Frozen view
The dashboard, preserved
Below is a faithful reproduction of the live dashboard at the moment of archival. Interactive elements (search, pinning, error reporting) have been removed; the data shown will never update again.
This is not live data. Runway configurations below reflect the last ATIS broadcasts parsed before the service was retired. Real-time information should be obtained from an official source such as the FAA or the airport's ATIS frequency.
Source
Run it yourself
The full project — parser, collector, dashboard, database schema, and Azure deployment manifests — is published on GitHub. Anyone who wants to stand the service back up can clone the repo and have it running locally, or deployed to their own cloud, in a handful of commands.
View on GitHub github.com/L13w/runways-in-useThis landing page is maintained separately at github.com/L13w/runwaysinuse-static — a static archive deployed via GitHub Pages. The repo above contains the full runnable project.
Closing note
Why it's archived
The service ran for several months and achieved its design goal. It was retired to reduce ongoing infrastructure cost now that the experiment is complete. The database, trained model, and infrastructure configuration are preserved offline.