Geneva Airport Movements Enquiries
ARAG is proud to offer you this new way of finding out what aircraft used Geneva Airport at selected times of the day on selected days. This document includes a simple guide to what you can find out using GAME. Further help will eventually be included in GAME itself, probably once it stops being developed : we welcome any suggestions for improving it.
The conditions for the usage of GAME are explained in a separate Conditions of Usage document. By making use of GAME you are held to have read and agreed to these conditions
To try out this facility without reading any documentation (or because you have already read it but forgotten to bookmark the GAME page) just click on the name
You will find lots of in-line documentation, in particular the names of the input data fields and the headings for the results table. You might also find interesting information by clicking on some of the table entries.
Once you have tried it then we would be happy to receive any remarks, error reports or improvement suggestions : send these to webmaster@aragge.ch . You may also be interested by our daily report on all air traffic at or around the airport : send to the same email address any request to receive, or to stop receiving, these daily reports.
GAME asks you to specify the start hour and the number of consecutive hours from that start hour. This number of hours may continue into the following day: if you ask for night traffic by specifying 8 hours from 22h then you get data going into the next day.
You then specify the first and last calendar days : it is recommended not to make the last day precede the first day :-)
The movement type can specify takeoffs only, landings only or everything.
A particular aircraft can be specified by its 6 character hexadecimal identifier (484074 was a particularly noisy and old aircraft heard in August, including a landing at 3h05 on 13 August, whilst 1533E2 and 15521F were both measured at around 95dBA on 8 October!). Information on aircraft according to this identifier can be found in http://www.airframes.org.
Particular flights may be specified by indicating either all or the starting part of the ICAO flight callsign or by specifying a flight code and number. Thus, to select flights of Easyjet (UK), ask for callsign or flight "EZY". For particular flights you can select the exact flight number (e.g. EZS1433) or a group of numbers (EZS1401,1409). For all Easyjet flights select "EZ". If you precede the selection with a minus sign (e.g. -EZ) then these flights will be excluded.
You can also select the airport(s) or place or country at the other end (but we only know about scheduled flights). Thus, for Madrid select either "MAD" (the airport code for Madrid airport) or the (partial) name "Madrid". If, instead you select "Spain"Spain, either by the country name or the country code (ES), you get all known flights to any Spanish airport. For the UK, you could get all London airports by specifying "London", or you might just specify "Gatwick".
It is possible to include, or exclude, flights according to categories 0-9. These categories are still being defined: for information see
It is also possible to select or exclude aircraft according to their type, description or country of origin.
Examples of types could include A3 for Airbus 300 series, MD8 for the (noisy) McDonnell Douglas 8x series, IL for the (even noisier) Ilyushin, PC for Pilatus.
Examples of descriptions could include H for helicopters, 4J for 4-engine jets or P for piston engines.
Examples of countries could include FR for all French aircraft, LY for Libya or -CH for all except Swiss aircraft.
The results indicate the total number of movements for the time period selected, followed by the data for each movement. For all except the time and date columns there is a description available by clicking on the title column. For many of the entries in the columns there is also additional information by clicking on a particular entry.
For the modern aircraft with modern transponders we can normally identify in which direction on the runway the aircraft landed or took off (runway 05, indicated in blue background, is towards lake Geneva, runway 23, indicated in green background, is away from it). When we can do this, then clicking on the particular runway entry will link to the site of EANS which can show the flight path trajectories.
GAME uses data which has been collected from the monitoring of aircraft transponder broadcasts since March 20 in 2008. However, from that date until 19 May 2008 this monitoring only included data from modern commercial airliners. As of 20 May we have also data from ALL aircraft with an active transponder (older commercial aircraft, private jets, helicoptes, even small propeller planes). Note, however, that many helicopters and small propeller planes are instructed not to activate their transponder, apparently because the pilots of big commercial aircraft then get too many warnings of possible collisions.
The data is normally sent every hour. This means that after at most 75 minutes the data of "today" is available.
Please note that, although we do our best to ensure that all data is correct, it is possible for there to be some errors (for instance, due to a programming error or an error in the transponder data sent out by the aircraft).
So now go ahead and try GAME !