ADS-B is literally public data. There are several public exchanges that provide feeds without filtering and any person with one hour of time can access this data in real-time.
When some billionare buy private jet he is aware about fact that his jet can be easily tracked. If person decide to be a public figure he have to deal with fact that he'll be tracked around.
ADS-B is an automatic broadcast of an airplane's position and velocity, intended for making management of the airspace easer, among other things. It is not encrypted, and you can set up the hardware to receive the signal with a modest amount of effort. There is apparently a website somewhere where these hobbyists are aggregating this data.
ADS-B signals (from my limited knowledge) are transmitted by aircraft showing some basic data like location, altitude, speed, callsign, aircraft model and a few other things. They only have a range of a few hundred kilometers so a website that does flight tracking using a global network of (volunteer) receivers, it's a step in their coverage to be picking up signals over the oceans.
ADS-B transmissions are not "public data" you can look up, what you're referring to as "public data" are datasets of dubious legality from the likes of flightradar24 who operate ADS-B logging devices around the world.
For example, in Europe what they're doing is strictly in violation of the GDPR.
FA doesn't always show ground data (they must do some sort of filtering), but it is available via ADS-B. If you visit sites like www.adsbexchange.com or look at a receiver's raw data, you'll see ground data.
Conceivably, the ADS-B data source might be the same as the data source for this API, at least in that they might be calculated from the same instruments and flight systems.
I would love to see an open source network of ADS-B collectors form, similar to what's available for the APRS-IS [1] network. The big ADS-B players (Flightaware and FlightRadar24) get their ADS-B feeds from the FAA (5-min delayed) and supplement it with real-time over-the-air collection from volunteers around the world. These companies give away small ethernet-connected collection servers to the volunteers and in exchange, they get the data and keep it proprietary.
It sure would be nice if there was a network to collect and pass around this data for free consumption by whoever wanted to use it.
Speaking for the USA, the ADS-B data stream you see on FlightAware's commercial feeds has military and police aircraft data filtered, even if those aircraft are broadcasting that information. While ADS-B data reception is public, certain data types must be removed in your commercial offering per FAA.
Near me in Puget Sound / Seattle are two intl airports, several military bases including a nuclear sub base, plus we're near the US / Canadian border. Air traffic as you can imagine is very interesting and includes state police Cessna's at night cruising for people speeding on Highway 18, military transport through JBLM (military base) but no fighter jet ADS-B. There's commercial air traffic, hobby planes, private jets, hospital and news helicopters. There's flight paths and local flight patterns. My current mystery are the small, black, unmarked DHS (I think!) helicopters that cruise Discovery Park lighthouse every few hours. They don't show up on ADS-B at all. There's more but you get the idea of how cool this all is. SDR is just wild. All you need is a Pi 3 and the PiAware image, the antenna and the 1050 filter they suggest. PiAware has a local webinterface that shows everything it's picking up but will be filtered later by FlightAware.
Agreed! I picked one up and learned about ADSB protocol and usage, and now have a live view of the air traffic in my vicinity. Sure, I could use one of the websites that tracks that info, but there's something about viewing it on your own equipment.
I track several of these aircraft a week, and they usually don't have ADS-B. I track them via multilateration, combining my receiver's data with data from several other receivers (as part of the Flightaware network: http://flightaware.com/adsb/)
Panasonic holds an almost monopoly on aircraft inflight entertainment, especially on widebody planes. They run redboot Linux and have a pretty strict firewall between the plane and computer. All of what the author did was expected by the Panasonic devs hence the disclaimer.
Ads-b carries a lot of this data (at a lower interval) and is available to anyone with an antenna. Sites like FlightAware will republish it as graphs or maps. There also exist apps that take ads-b data and renders flight data in a google earth type view.
A part of me is really excited that we live in this time, but I’m living in constant fear that open data will disappear one day, so enjoy while you can!
I contribute ADS-B data grabbed with SDR to Flightradar24. It's pretty sweet because they give you their Business subscription plan (the highest one, $50/month) for free.
I think you may need at least a free account to see the stats, but in any case these are my two sites:
reply