Where our data comes from
Every number on this site comes from somewhere, and you should be able to check it. This page lists each source, how often it refreshes, what we are licensed to show, and the things we deliberately refuse to publish.
What powers the live boards and conditions
AeroDataBox
Powers: Every flight board: times, terminals, gates, status
Commercial flight data API, accessed through the API.market gateway. We hold written permission for public display and short-term caching. We do not keep a permanent archive of their data, which is why this site shows you the next eight hours rather than flight history.
FAA National Airspace System status
Powers: Ground stops, ground delay programmes, the delay verdict
The FAA publishes live airspace status for US airports. When JFK has a system-wide delay, this is the feed that knows first, and it is the difference between "your flight is late" and "the whole airport is stopped."
National Weather Service
Powers: Conditions at JFK, active weather alerts
Observations from station KJFK, which sits at the airport itself, plus active alerts for the area. We read the weather in plain language rather than reprinting a forecast.
MTA real-time feeds
Powers: Subway and LIRR status on the conditions page
GTFS-Realtime feeds covering the A, E, J and Z lines and the Long Island Rail Road, the services that actually connect to the AirTrain.
How fresh is the flight data really?
Flight data is cached for two minutes, so the board you are reading is at most two minutes behind the airline's own feed. If the upstream feed fails, we hold the last good data and show you an honest "feed unavailable" notice rather than a blank table or a stale one pretending to be current. Conditions data (airspace, weather, transit) refreshes on a ten minute cycle, because ground stops and weather do not change second to second.
What this does not give you is flight history. Our licence covers showing you what is happening now, not building an archive, so the boards look forward about eight hours and no further back than the recent past.
Where the written facts come from
Terminal layouts, gate ranges, parking rates and airport facilities come from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK, and from the individual terminal operators. Airline contact numbers and check-in links come from each airline's own website and nowhere else. Lost and found contacts come from the organisation that actually holds the items: the airport, TSA, the terminal operators, or the MTA.
What we refuse to publish
This is the part most sites leave out, and it is the reason some fields on this site are empty when a competitor's are full.
- Unverified contact numbers. We publish phone numbers for the airlines whose own sites we could read and verify. For the rest, the field is blank. A wrong number for a stranded traveller is worse than no number, and aggregator sites copying each other is not verification.
- Invented hold times. Nearly every lost-and-found page online states how long JFK keeps items. No official source publishes a single figure, so our guide says exactly that instead of repeating a number nobody can source.
- Anything we could not check. When a fact resists verification, it does not ship. Blank beats confidently wrong.
Known limits and gaps
- Road traffic is not live yet. The conditions page covers airspace, weather and rail, but not road incidents. The 511NY integration is written and waiting on an API key, and until it is switched on this page will keep saying so.
- Terminal assignments move. JFK is mid-rebuild, so an airline's terminal can change. The live board is always the tiebreaker over anything written on a guide page, including ours.
- We are independent. Better JFK Airport is not affiliated with the Port Authority, any airline, or any terminal operator. We cannot look up your booking or find your bag, and where a task belongs to one of those organisations we send you to them.
Found something wrong?
Corrections are welcome and get fixed rather than argued with. The site is maintained by Lawrence Hitches, and the reader questions we publish are answered by a person, not generated.
See the systems these feeds power: how JFK is running today, today’s JFK arrivals, and JFK Airport history and facts.