No. You can trade on material, nonpublic data as much as you'd like. Insider trading is not illegal unless you're breaking a confidentiality agreement or fiduciary duty.

If you manage to discover confidential data in a way that does not compromise such an agreement or duty, you're fine. Obviously you should engage with an attorney instead of taking legal advice from a random HN comment, but there's really no issue with this. Information asymmetry is a fundamental part of the market and not illegal on its own.

Source: I used to work in financial forecasting using significant amounts of alternative data.

Yeah, "non-public, material information" is what I'm used to seeing, and I think that classifies this air-traffic data just fine. The coffee shop example, however, sounds like it's both non-public and material, yet in the US is not considered insider trading. So you might say "non-public material information" is necessary, but not sufficient, grounds for an insider trading case.

Well, it is publically available in that anyone can subscribe and get the data. I’d venture to guess anyone can get the tail number flight patterns from the FAA. The value add is matching that to who owns or is leasing the plane.