Building an OpenSky Flight Data Pipeline with dbt Core
Recently, I built an OpenSky Flight Data Pipeline that ingests aircraft state vectors into PostgreSQL and transforms them into analytics-ready datasets using dbt Core. Along the way, I discovered that dbt isn't just about writing SQL, it brings software engineering practices like modularity, testing, documentation, and dependency management to analytics.
In this article, I'll walk through how I used dbt, the concepts I learned, and how I organized my project.
The Problem
The OpenSky Network provides aircraft state vectors containing information such as:
