US 🇺🇸 FAA Telephony Designators

Name	us-faa-telephony-designators
Country	United States (FAA-assigned designators for operators worldwide, plus US-only special telephony)
Data source	https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/cnt_html/chap3_section_3.html and .../chap3_section_4.html (FAA Order 7340.2)
Format	HTML tables (two fixed pages, no discovery step)
Run frequency	Weekly (Tuesday, 06:10 UTC — one hour after mictronics)
Depends on Mictronics	Must run after mictronics — see "Additive-only, never overrides" below.

What this is

operator:{designator} (an operator's name, country, and radio telephony callsign — shown alongside a flight's ident wherever this repo displays operator info) is written only by runners/mictronics/main.py, from Mictronics' own operators.json. That file has real gaps: as of 2026-09-20, FAA Order 7340.2 assigns 171 ICAO three-letter airline designators Mictronics' operators.json does not have — including currently-operating carriers like KM Malta Airlines (KMM), Madagascar Airlines (MGY), AJet (TKJ), Bermudair (BMA), and Porter Airlines' second, Dash-8-specific designator (PTR, distinct from its main POE, which Mictronics already has).

This runner backfills exactly that gap, from two independent FAA sources:

• Section 3 — "Three-Letter Designator/Aircraft Company/Telephony Decode": the standard ICAO 3-letter airline company designator table, ~5,700 rows (worldwide, not US-specific).
• Section 4 — "U.S. Special Telephony/Call Signs": ~20 US government/agency/special-use callsigns (NASA, FEMA, state fire departments, etc.) with a variable-length "Identifier" — not always 3 letters (ARSIX, NASA, FEMA).

Additive-only, never overrides

Mictronics is the preferred source (better name capitalization, actively maintained). This runner writes operator:{designator} only when that key does not already exist in Redis — via shared.redis_json.set_json(..., nx=True), Redis JSON.SET's native NX option, a single atomic command rather than a check-then-set race. It never updates or removes an existing entry, from any source, ever.

Correctness against a future Mictronics update falls out of scheduling order, not a merge script: mictronics's own writer already overwrites operator:{designator} unconditionally on every run. If Mictronics later adds a designator this runner already backfilled, Mictronics' next scheduled run simply replaces it — which is exactly why this runner must run after mictronics in the schedule, the same dependency convention bz-bdca-registry/is-samgongustofa-registry already use for a different reason (resolving ICAO hex against Mictronics' own data).

TTL is refreshed independently of the content write

operator:{designator} gets the standard ENRICHMENT_TTL_SECONDS (14 days), same as every other enrichment key — but the TTL refresh is separate from the NX content write. Content is written at most once, ever (every subsequent run finds the key already present and NX is a no-op) — so if the TTL were only ever set at write time, the record would expire and vanish from Redis between runs, then reappear on the next run, a real, avoidable gap. Instead, this runner refreshes the TTL on every designator it processes on every run — written or not, including designators it never wrote the content of (e.g. an existing Mictronics-sourced entry). That makes this runner a second, independent keep-alive heartbeat for the whole operator:{designator} keyspace: a record only expires if every runner that touches its key stops running for 14 days, matching every other enrichment key's failure mode, rather than never expiring at all regardless of whether the underlying data is still correct.

Section 4 handling

• country is not a column on this table at all — every Section 4 entry is by definition US-issued, so it's defaulted to "United States".
• Expiration Date: a row whose expiration has already passed (checked against the real current date each run, not a fixed cutoff) is skipped entirely — not imported, not retried. N/A (permanent) always imports.

Columns

Source column	Imported	Notes
Section 3: 3-Ltr	✅	→ Redis key (operator:{designator}) and airline_designator
Section 3: Company	✅	→ name
Section 3: Country	✅	→ country
Section 3: Telephony	✅ (when present)	→ callsign; ~540 of ~6,240 rows have no assigned callsign — still imported with name/country only
Section 4: Identifier	✅	→ Redis key and airline_designator; not always 3 letters
Section 4: Telephony/Call Sign	✅	→ callsign
Section 4: Company or Operating Agency	✅	→ name
Section 4: Expiration Date	❌ (used only to gate import)	Not stored — a record either imports (not expired) or doesn't; there's no "expired" state to represent in Redis

The Section 3 page splits its one logical table across ~26 separate <table> elements (each with the same repeated header row) rather than one — this runner parses and combines every matching table, not just the first found.

See specs/data-dictionary.yaml (us-faa-telephony-designators entry) for full column semantics.

Example Output

A designator this runner backfilled (Mictronics has no KMM entry):

docker run --rm --network host redis:latest redis-cli JSON.GET operator:KMM

{
    "airline_designator": "KMM",
    "name": "KM MALTA AIRLINES PLC.",
    "country": "MALTA",
    "callsign": "SKY KNIGHT"
}

A Section 4 special-telephony entry:

docker run --rm --network host redis:latest redis-cli JSON.GET operator:FEMA

{
    "airline_designator": "FEMA",
    "name": "Federal Emergency Management Agency",
    "country": "United States",
    "callsign": "FEMA"
}

Related fix in this same change: military aircraft no longer skip operator lookup

message-processor/main.py's _enrich_operator() previously returned immediately for any aircraft flagged military: true, skipping the operator:{designator} lookup entirely regardless of whether a real match existed. Several Section 4 entries (state fire departments, state DOTs, FEMA, the Commemorative Air Force's TORA TORA TORA) are plausibly flown by aircraft flagged military: true in the registry — exactly the population that blanket skip silently excluded from ever getting an operator name. The skip has been removed; a military aircraft whose ident prefix doesn't match any operator:{designator} key now just misses like any other lookup (counted in the existing _operator_misses metric), with no change for the common non-matching case.

Configuration

See Data Runners for the full list of environment variables every runner reads. This runner writes operator:{designator} with the standard 14-day TTL (ENRICHMENT_TTL_SECONDS in shared/timing.py), refreshed independently of the content write (see above).

MQTT

Published once, at the end of a run, to SkyFollower/runner/us-faa-telephony-designators/statistic/{name} (all retained):

Topic suffix	Value	Format
records_imported	e.g. 171	Integer as string — count of designators processed this run, newly written plus already-present (TTL refreshed), not rows parsed
last_run_at	e.g. 2026-09-23T06:10:01.123456+00:00	ISO 8601 UTC
last_run_status	Success or Failure	String

Home Assistant autodiscovery configs are also published (retained) to homeassistant/sensor/SkyFollower_runner_us_faa_telephony_designators_{name}/config for each of the three stats above.