Bts Ontime MCP Server

@pipeworx/bts-ontime

US domestic airline on-time performance and delay causes: monthly on-time %, average arrival delay, cancellations, diversions, and delay minutes broken down by cause (carrier, weather, air-traffic-control/NAS, security, late aircraft) — by route, by carrier, and by arrival airport. Fleet #2953.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1779+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• route_ontime(origin, dest, carrier?, months?) — monthly on-time performance for one origin->destination route, optionally scoped to one carrier. Each month carries flights, completed flights, on-time arrivals and on-time %, average arrival delay, cancellations, diversions, and delay minutes by cause.
• carrier_ontime(carrier, airport?, months?) — the same monthly shape, aggregated across one airline's whole network (or just the flights touching one airport).
• bts_airport_delays(airport, year?, month?, limit?, offset?) — delay-cause breakdown by carrier for flights ARRIVING at one airport, optionally scoped to a year and/or month. limit defaults to 50 (max 200); a response with more matching rows than returned carries truncated: true and total_matching rather than silently dropping them.
• delay_causes(year, carrier?, airport?, limit?, offset?) — the same delay-cause rows, organized by year first, for scanning a whole year across carriers or airports. Same limit/truncated/total_matching pagination as bts_airport_delays.
• list_coverage() — the earliest/latest month actually loaded, and when. Call this first if you're not sure a given period is covered.

Carrier accepts either the 2-letter reporting-carrier code ("DL") or a common airline name ("Delta"). Airport codes are validated against what is actually loaded (not a static list) — an unrecognized code is refused with a clear error, never an empty success.

Auth

Keyless. The tools answer only through the Pipeworx gateway, which holds the data; a standalone npm install has no data to read, and every tool throws a clear "not bound in this runtime" error there instead of returning an empty list.

Data sources

• US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), TranStats — "Reporting Carrier On-Time Performance" monthly bulk data. US federal government work: public domain (17 U.S.C. §105). The agency publishes bulk files only (no live query API for this dataset), so this pack builds a copy (scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs) rather than proxying — raw flight-level rows (~600k/month) are never stored; the loader aggregates each month down to two small tables and discards the raw file before moving to the next one.

What delay_cause is, and is not

BTS separately publishes its own "Airline Delay Cause" product, which apportions each delayed flight's minutes into fractional per-cause counts via a methodology this pack does not reimplement. The delay_cause table here is derived from the same underlying per-flight delay-minute fields (carrier/weather/NAS/security/late-aircraft) as route_month, rolled up by carrier x arrival-airport x month, and reported as minute sums, not fractional counts. It will be consistent with BTS's own published cause breakdown but is not guaranteed to match it row-for-row — this is one pipeline over one raw source, not a second download of BTS's own aggregate.

Known gaps — read before extending this pack

Coverage is the most recent months as of the load, not full history. BTS's bulk-file server throttles hard per connection — one file download measured ~170 seconds regardless of a modest concurrency increase helping (3 concurrent downloads of this upstream finished in about the same wall time as 1 serial one, measured 2026-10-12), so pulling the full 1987-present archive (400+ monthly files) in one sitting is a multi-hour job, not a pack-build step. This first load covers the most recent 12 months as of 2026-10-12 (call list_coverage for the exact range) for BOTH tables — there is no separate 2003-onward backfill for delay_cause in this commit; it is derived from the same months as route_month.

Extending coverage is mechanical, not research — see "Refreshing or extending the data" below. Re-running the loader with a larger --months (and a --concurrency tuned to be polite to the upstream) pulls further back; nothing about the schema or the tools changes.

Refreshing or extending the data

node scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs --months 12                 # default: most recent 12 months
node scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs --months 36 --concurrency 4 # extend further back
node scripts/bts-ontime/load-data.mjs --through 2026-7            # pin the "latest" month instead of probing

Needs wrangler logged in to the Pipeworx Cloudflare account. Each run replaces route_month, delay_cause and bts_ontime_meta (DROP + reload) rather than appending — BTS's own monthly files are themselves revised occasionally, so a clean reload is the only way to be sure stale rows from a withdrawn/corrected file don't linger. A monthly refresh (BTS publishes with a roughly 2-month lag) should re-run this with a --months large enough to cover the gap since the last load, not just 12, or the oldest previously-loaded months will quietly drop off the window.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bts-ontime": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bts-ontime/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/bts-ontime/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1779+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/route_ontime \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"origin":"JFK","dest":"LAX","months":3}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/route_ontime. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bts-ontime": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-bts-ontime"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-bts-ontime

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Bts Ontime data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT