Flight Report

This dataset covers two days of ADS-B traffic at Sydney Kingsford Smith International Airport (YSSY), from 1 January to 2 January 2026, captured across 992,833 position points. The period falls on the 106th anniversary of the establishment of the original airfield that would become Sydney Airport. Over those 48 hours, 1,351 flights were recorded: 630 arrivals, 649 departures, and 72 touch-and-goes. A total of 416 unique aircraft were observed, registered across 22 countries, with Australian-registered aircraft accounting for 272 of them. Chinese and US-registered aircraft were the next largest groups at 29 and 23 respectively. Traffic built sharply from near-zero in the early morning hours, with 4:00 AEDT recording no movements at all. Activity accelerated through the morning and peaked at 16:00 AEDT with 104 flights in that single hour. The average across all hours was 28.1 flights per hour. The Sydney to Melbourne corridor was the busiest route by a wide margin, with 165 total movements (78 arrivals, 87 departures). Brisbane followed at 115, then Gold Coast at 74 and Adelaide at 54. Two entries in the top ten, Coonabarabran (26 departures, zero arrivals) and Coonamble (24 departures, zero arrivals), show entirely one-directional traffic over the observation window. Approach directions were led by NNE (138) and SW (103), with departures similarly concentrated on SW (126) and NNE (122). The altitude distribution shows the highest concentration of position reports below 1,000 feet (155,269 points), with a second dense band between 37,000 and 38,000 feet (46,224 points). The average recorded altitude across all points was 16,859 feet. The highest-altitude flight reached 48,425 feet, flown by VH-AP7, a domestic Australian-registered aircraft arriving from an unspecified origin. The longest flight by distance was logged at 6,588.7 nautical miles, associated with a departure toward Al Ain International Airport (OMAL), though its hex code and lack of tail number place it in the unverified category.