I've got a researcher looking for a source of historical flight data for small Canadian carriers. He wants individual flights including departure/arrival information and cancellations.
Is this available through the Airport Activity Survey, or any other Statistics Canada data source?
If not, does anyone on this know of the source for this data in Canada? For example, where do sites like http://flightaware.com obtain/purchase their Canadian data from? Directly from individual carriers? Or Transport Canada? (I don't see anything particularly likely on their website).
Answer
Some of this is available from NavCanada’s Aircraft Movement Statistics reports. Unfortunately, it’s been discontinued; the last release was in 2015. I don’t see any information about specific carriers, though.
Here’s a list of the publications and CANSIM tables related to aircraft movement.
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/51-007-x/2014010/related-connexes-eng.htm
We have information on the arrival and departure of flights from Canadian airports by carrier from two potential sources – the Aircraft Movement Statistics (AMS) program and the Airport Activity Survey (AAS). The raw AMS data are collected from NAV CANADA and some small airports. The raw data for AAS are provided to us by Transport Canada who collect them directly from the carriers.
Unfortunately, for both AMS and AAS, the level of detail that the researcher is looking for is confidential. He/she could try a couple of websites (OAG, innovata) that have this kind of information but I doubt that either of these would have much coverage of small Canadian carriers.
