Aviar Labs Flight Log — August 2026
- Goa ~ Maker of SkyGlass
- Aug 13
- 6 min read
Aviation Intelligence, Wherever You Work.
From the Hangar
A lot has been happening behind the scenes at Aviar Labs.
Over the past several months, I’ve been working on new ways to make the intelligence behind SkyGlass more accessible — not just through the map, but through automated reporting, AI-assisted analysis, and agentic workflows.
Those pieces are now beginning to come together.
SkyGlass remains at the center, but the ecosystem around it is expanding:
SkyReports can monitor activity and deliver intelligence directly to your inbox.
Kestrel brings an AI aviation analyst directly inside SkyGlass.
SkyGlass MCP opens years of historical aviation intelligence to AI agents and workflows.
There’s a simple way to think about where this is headed:
Explore. Monitor. Understand. Extend.
Before getting into what’s new, though, here’s something you can use today.
New Resource: SkyGlass Zero-to-Hero
If you’re new to SkyGlass — or just want a quick refresher — I’ve created a new Zero-to-Hero Quick Start Guide designed to get you from launch to useful aircraft tracking in under a minute.
The visual guide walks through the essential workflow:
Launch SkyGlass → Set your location → Tune your interface → Load traffic → Explore
It also covers some of the fastest ways to narrow the picture using aircraft filters, classifications, watchlists, and geographic search.
This is the first of several practical SkyGlass explainers I’m developing, with the goal of making some of the platform’s deeper capabilities easier to discover and use.
A Growing Aviation Intelligence Ecosystem
The bigger story this month isn’t a single feature.
It’s how the different parts of Aviar Labs are beginning to work together.
SkyGlass — Explore
SkyGlass remains the operational workspace at the center of the ecosystem.
It provides the environment for exploring live aircraft activity, investigating historical operations, monitoring watchlists, visualizing airspace and aviation data in 3D, and digging deeper when something catches your attention.
Increasingly, however, the question is not simply:
What aircraft are flying right now?
It’s also:
What does this activity mean? How does it compare with what happened before? And how can I surface the activity that matters without constantly watching the map?
That’s where the next pieces come in.
SkyReports — Monitor
Aviation intelligence that comes to you.
SkyReports is designed for situations where you don’t want to continually search for activity—you want the activity that matters to be monitored and delivered to you.
Currently in open beta, SkyReports can provide customized daily, weekly, or monthly flight reporting based on the aircraft, fleets, operators, or operational activity relevant to you.
A report can summarize flight counts, flight hours, aircraft types, geographic patterns, and other activity, then add automated analytical context to help surface what may deserve a closer look.
And the email doesn't have to be the end of the investigation.
SkyReports can link directly back into SkyGlass, allowing you to move from a scheduled intelligence product into the interactive 3D environment for further investigation.
Bespoke Aviation Intelligence
Sometimes you don't need another dashboard.
You need an answer.
The same underlying intelligence capabilities can also support deeper, bespoke aviation intelligence products for individuals and Enterprise customers.
A recent example examined 30 days of global C-17 Globemaster III activity.
The analysis worked across 22,200 observations and more than 100 observed airframes, examining changes in operational tempo, geographic concentrations, major activity nodes, individual aircraft activity and anomalies.
Rather than simply reporting a headline increase, the analysis compared the rolling period against cleaner full-calendar periods and found that the underlying fleet tempo was substantially flatter than the initial comparison suggested. It also identified Altus AFB as the leading concentration of observed activity and assessed the broader pattern as primarily training-driven rather than indicative of a contingency surge.
That distinction is exactly why analysis matters.
Kestrel — Understand
An AI aviation analyst inside SkyGlass.
Kestrel is something I’ve been working toward for a long time.
Rather than being another standalone product, Kestrel lives directly inside SkyGlass.
When aircraft are loaded on the map, Kestrel can be provided with the context of what you are actually seeing—including callsigns, ICAO hex codes, flight telemetry, position information, and other available aircraft data.
Hit Analyze, and Kestrel can evaluate the traffic currently loaded in your SkyGlass environment.
Then keep talking.
Ask why a pattern may be interesting. Ask about a particular aircraft. Narrow the investigation. Compare what you're seeing. Or move away from the loaded traffic entirely and ask a broader aviation question.
The goal is to make analysis conversational while keeping it connected to the operational picture in front of you.
And now Kestrel can go further.
With SkyGlass MCP integrated into Kestrel, the conversation is no longer limited to the traffic currently displayed.
For example:
Show me C-17 activity over CONUS for the last 30 days.
Kestrel can reach into the historical SkyGlass intelligence layer, retrieve the relevant activity, and pass the resulting spatial intelligence back into SkyGlass.
SkyGlass can then render that analysis as an H3 hex-grid density visualization directly across the 3D map.
What would traditionally require extracting a large historical dataset, processing it, aggregating the positions geographically, and building a visualization can become a conversational request.
Ask the question.
Get the intelligence.
See the result.
SkyGlass MCP — Extend
Give AI agents access to aviation intelligence.
Behind that new Kestrel capability is SkyGlass MCP, now also in open beta.
MCP—or Model Context Protocol—provides a standardized way for AI agents to discover and use external tools.
SkyGlass MCP applies that model to aviation intelligence.
Rather than functioning as a live aircraft-position feed, MCP provides agents with structured access to derived historical and recent aviation intelligence built from the SkyGlass data environment.
That currently includes eight analytical capabilities covering Aircraft operational trends over time, Emerging, new, declining, and dropped routes, Aircraft pattern-of-life analysis, and more.
But the more interesting capability is what happens when those tools are combined.
From a question to an investigation
An MCP-connected agent discovers the available SkyGlass tools and can reason about which ones it needs to answer a question.
You might ask:
Find the ten most active P-8 Poseidons this month, then build a pattern-of-life profile for each aircraft.
The agent can first discover the relevant aircraft and then perform additional pattern-of-life queries against those results.
You don't have to manually prescribe every step.
That's the shift from simply querying a database toward an agentic aviation intelligence workflow.
Depending on the question, SkyGlass MCP can work across traffic trends, route changes, spatial concentrations, GPS-integrity events, individual aircraft behavior, operator fleets, and registry information.
And there is substantial depth behind it.
The intelligence environment now encompasses nearly 3 billion records, grows by over 1,500 records per minute, and draws from an archive extending back to early 2020.
That makes questions possible at a scale very different from what can reasonably be investigated one flight at a time.
SkyGlass and SkyGlass MCP therefore serve complementary roles:
SkyGlass gives you the operational picture.
SkyGlass MCP gives AI agents a way to investigate the historical intelligence behind it.
Kestrel brings the two together.
One Ecosystem. Multiple Ways to Work.
The individual capabilities are useful on their own, but the connections between them are where this gets interesting.
If you want to… | Use… |
Explore live aviation activity | SkyGlass |
Understand what you're seeing | Kestrel |
Monitor activity automatically | SkyReports |
Extend aviation intelligence into AI workflows | SkyGlass MCP |
Receive a finished intelligence product | Bespoke Aviation Intelligence |
A SkyReport can surface activity and bring you directly into SkyGlass to investigate it.
Inside SkyGlass, Kestrel can understand the operational context currently on your screen.
When the investigation needs to reach further, Kestrel can use SkyGlass MCP to interrogate years of historical aviation intelligence.
And those results can come back into the SkyGlass environment as something you can actually see and explore.
Reporting → Investigation → Analysis → Historical Intelligence → Visualization
Increasingly, these aren't separate tools.
They're different ways of interacting with the same aviation intelligence ecosystem.
Join the Open Beta
SkyReports, Kestrel, and SkyGlass MCP are all currently in open beta.
SkyReports
If there is an aircraft, fleet, operator, location, or operational pattern you would like monitored on a recurring basis, I'd like to hear about it.
Kestrel
Kestrel beta access is available to SkyGlass users across all tiers and can be enabled through the current beta enrollment form.
SkyGlass MCP
If you're working with MCP-compatible AI agents or exploring agentic aviation workflows, SkyGlass MCP is available for testing as well.
These aren't distant roadmap concepts.
They're running today, and I'm looking for users who want to help shape where they go next.
Contact me and let me know which product you want to explore.
Final Approach
SkyGlass began with a fairly simple idea: aviation activity becomes easier to understand when you can actually see it in three dimensions.
That idea hasn't changed.
What's changing is how many ways there now are to interact with the intelligence behind that picture.
You can explore it visually in SkyGlass.
You can have SkyReports monitor it for you.
You can ask Kestrel to help you understand it.
And now you can give AI agents access to years of historical aviation intelligence through SkyGlass MCP.
There is still a lot I want to build, and feedback from the people actually using these tools continues to influence where they go next.
Thanks for being part of it.
Explore it. Monitor it. Understand it. Extend it.
Aviation intelligence, wherever you work.
Tailwinds and clear skies,
Goa
Founder, Aviar Labs
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