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Flightradar24 – how it works

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Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#141

Post by Moru »

freeflight wrote: post #126
black-tea wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flightradar censors a lot of corporate jets and military/law enforcement aircraft Yes, this is disappointing. In the past I had seen military planes on there. I even saw fighters practising dogfighting over the North Sea. But more recently I've seen interesting aircraft fly over, such as large four-engine planes at altitude outside of normal commercial flight paths, but they just don't appear on flightradar. It's s…

ADS-B Exchange [0] has a tag for military aircraft, right now it's showing a whole bunch of military aircraft (German, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, UK, US) over central Europe. [0] https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html

Note that even the Swedish spy plane is using Ads-b while flying along the baltic International border zone taunting Russia but the migs answering the taunt is not. Also flying dangerously close to the spy plane (10 m reported once). However the US spy planes are also mostly flying with the transponder on there.

Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#142

Post by MarcysVonEylau »

LancerSykera wrote: post #132
MarcysVonEylau wrote: post #130

It's worth pointing out that you can get a free ADS-B receiver from sites like Flightradar24 or Flightaware. The hardware is often proprietary, but they must allow you to re-purpouse the data received by the antenna (it's public domain).

The article goes over this.

I'm really not a carefull reader...

Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#145

Post by corford »

RivieraKid wrote: post #22

Not a big fan of "data monopolies" like Flightradar24. It's as if OpenStreetMaps was a private company that capitalizes on being first into the space and having a community of contributors willing to supply data to a private company for free. I hope an open data project such as https://www.adsbexchange.com/ wins in the long-term.

"Data monopoly" implies FR24 have exclusive use and control over the ADS-B feeders. This simply isn't the case. There's nothing stopping you feeding your data to other sites/apps. Also (as is the case with flight aware), all users providing ADS-B data get free subscriptions to the paid for parts of FR24s service.

Building an app, maintaining a website (that has something like 2 million daily users iirc) and building out backend infra to support the huge amount of incoming data and turn it into something greater than the sum of its parts costs money. What many people don't realise is the data you see on FR24 is not simply derived from ADS-B broadcasts. Data like fight numbers comes from other licensed sources; MLAT triangulation is done at FR24's end; telemetry data for areas without community ADS-B coverage comes from partnerships with radar operators, airports (and soon satellite, when Aireon is active) etc.

If you're curious to know what raw info is included in a typical broadcast, this is a good link: https://www.adsbexchange.com/datafields/

Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#146

Post by corford »

bronco21016 wrote: post #102

I always thought it would be interesting to package all of this up and sell it to small operators. For example, a flight school could deploy a small scale RTL-SDR based ADS-B/MLAT system for tracking of their aircraft. The geographic area required to cover would be relatively small. Perhaps a 50 nm radius around the base. Of course they could also just fill in the gaps of something like Flightradar or ADS-B exchange…

Flight Aware offer a conceptually similar product (i.e. aimed at small operators/FBOs that want to track aircraft) but it uses data from their network rather than needing you to setup your own gear: https://www.flightaware.com/commercial/global

For a more DIY approach, there's these two: http://www.coaa.co.uk/planeplotter.htm http://www.virtualradarserver.co.uk/Default.aspx

Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#147

Post by JoeDaDude »

black-tea wrote: post #117
Rebelgecko wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I looked closely it was similar in North America and Europe. Asia, Africa, and over the oceans had some pretty big gaps. There's also no delay on the data, although I think Flightradar and Flightaware dropped the 5 minute delay they used to have. Flightradar censors a lot of corporate jets and military/law enforcement aircraft but I don't think Opensky does. In fact one of either Opensky or adsbexchange eve…

> Flightradar censors a lot of corporate jets and military/law enforcement aircraft Yes, this is disappointing. In the past I had seen military planes on there. I even saw fighters practising dogfighting over the North Sea. But more recently I've seen interesting aircraft fly over, such as large four-engine planes at altitude outside of normal commercial flight paths, but they just don't appear on flightradar. It's s…

Some activists were using this kind of service to track dictator's flights to track stolen money [1]. If said dictator's can block their aircraft, the misappropriated funds would be easier to sneak out of the country.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700445

Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#148

Post by closetohome »

corford wrote: post #145
RivieraKid wrote: post #22

Not a big fan of "data monopolies" like Flightradar24. It's as if OpenStreetMaps was a private company that capitalizes on being first into the space and having a community of contributors willing to supply data to a private company for free. I hope an open data project such as https://www.adsbexchange.com/ wins in the long-term.

"Data monopoly" implies FR24 have exclusive use and control over the ADS-B feeders. This simply isn't the case. There's nothing stopping you feeding your data to other sites/apps. Also (as is the case with flight aware), all users providing ADS-B data get free subscriptions to the paid for parts of FR24s service. Building an app, maintaining a website (that has something like 2 million daily users iirc) and building…

> There's nothing stopping you feeding your data to other sites/apps

Except the TOS, if you're using one of their receiver kits.

Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#149

Post by closetohome »

coin wrote: post #103
RivieraKid wrote: post #22

Not a big fan of "data monopolies" like Flightradar24. It's as if OpenStreetMaps was a private company that capitalizes on being first into the space and having a community of contributors willing to supply data to a private company for free. I hope an open data project such as https://www.adsbexchange.com/ wins in the long-term.

Completely agree. FR24, along with FlightAware, Radarbox24 and Plane Finder has built a business of monetizing free, crowdsourced data. For FR24 there's been multiple requests by the community to for an API, some willing to pay, but they've refused every time. I don't understand why people are eager to feed into those closed network. ADSB Exchange on the other hand is built with an open premise, runs off donations, a…

They also started out with a fairly expensive premium app, and then jettisoned it in favor of a subscription-based service, leaving everyone who bought the app high and dry.

Re: Flightradar24 – how it works

#150

Post by djsumdog »

freeflight wrote: post #125
chrissnell wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably not much stopping FR24 from feeding off of ADSB Exchange. This happens in the weather world, where data from community-managed CWOP weather stations ends up in the hands of commercial weather data services, who normalize the feeds and incorporate them into their forecasting products.

Isn't there some kind of "free to use, but not to commercialize" license the CWOP people could be releasing their data under?

That gets into the very tricky idea of "What is commercialization?" If you use a Creative Commons works that's BY-NC on your blog, but your blog runs ads, is it now commercial? What if it's funded by Patreon? That's why Wikipedia doesn't allow NC and the premise behind the Free Culture licenses.
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