FlightAware has sued Kalshi in federal court in Manhattan, accusing the prediction-market exchange of using its flight-tracking data and trademarked name to settle bets on flight cancellations without permission. The suit follows a monthlong dispute that Kalshi’s own public response never quite addressed.
What Kalshi Told the CFTC
Kalshi filed paperwork with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on July 14 to launch event contracts on airport-wide flight cancellations, naming FlightAware as the data source that would settle them. Two days later, facing criticism online that airport insiders or bad actors could manufacture cancellations to collect payouts, Kalshi shelved the contracts before they went live.
Kalshi returned to the idea eleven days later with a narrower version: a contract tied to a single measurement window at John F. Kennedy International Airport, open only to roughly 1,000 institutional traders and carved out to exclude cancellations caused by bomb threats, cyberattacks or laser strikes.
Susquehanna took the other side of the trade, capping its exposure at $3 million, and the event organizer NEXTPredict paid $12,000 to have the contract created.
What FlightAware’s Contract Actually Says
FlightAware, owned by RTX’s Collins Aerospace division since 2021, publishes terms of use that bar customers from putting its data or API “in connection with any betting, wagering, gambling, prediction market, event contract, or similar platform or product that enables participants to place, trade, or settle positions based on the occurrence or outcome of future events.” The terms describe that use as a material breach of the license.
FlightAware has its own recent history defending how it handles data. A 2024 exposure of customer information drew scrutiny from privacy researchers and at least one legal inquiry, a reminder that the company treats control over its data pipeline as central to its business.
A Defense That Answers a Different Question
Kalshi’s public-domain argument is a claim about ownership of facts: that nobody can control who repeats a flight’s cancellation status once it’s known.
They make a licensing argument, one about what a customer agreed to do with data it was given access to, and a trademark argument about whose name shows up on a betting page. That gap between the defense Kalshi gave reporters and the claim FlightAware appears to be making in court is where a data dispute that Kalshi called baseless turned into a federal lawsuit.
- July 14 – Kalshi files CFTC paperwork naming FlightAware as its settlement source.
- July 16 – Kalshi pulls the contracts after public backlash over manipulation risk.
- July 27 – Kalshi relaunches a narrower, JFK-only version for institutional traders.
- July 31 – New York’s attorney general sues Kalshi, alleging it runs an illegal gambling operation.
- August 11 – FlightAware sues Kalshi over the flight-cancellation data dispute.
The shape of this dispute has a precedent in sports betting, where Sportradar and Genius Sports have sued each other repeatedly over who has the right to collect and resell official game data to bookmakers. That fight is about the same underlying tension: a company that generates or aggregates real-time data wants to control who gets to build a wagering product on top of it, regardless of whether the facts themselves could be observed by anyone watching. Prediction markets are now running into the same problem sports betting already has, just with airports standing in for stadiums.
Kalshi is now defending two lawsuits that started from different premises but landed less than two weeks apart, one over whether its business model is legal at all, the other over whether it followed the rules of a specific data agreement while building a single product.
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