Notice that avoiding that the plane disappears does not save any life. That's why people do not care so much about it, and that's why they stil disappear.
That said, good telemetry brings economical gains. Planes will stop disappearing in due time, just not by state decree, and probably because of more usfull devices than this one.
That's Bloomberg's comment not mine. Not sure where the sudden need to downvote is coming from. My point is that it's now a free service to track planes. It was possible to track MH370, for example, but it required a fee.
It's not even that pilots are a minority and that's why no one cares. It's that most air travel is commercial, and nobody cares if someone can see where exact UAL123 is at this moment. Nobody feels bad for some millionaire's private jet getting tracked, nobody feels bad for some expensive charter plane with $15k tickets getting tracked, and the only thing left is small GA aircraft, which nobody care about at all.
The pearl clutching from some pilots (not accusing you of this) around aircraft tracking, ADSB, etc., seems exceptionally silly to me.
...and by the way, we offer a service that only costs $1/h/plane and we'd like governments to force everyone to pay us. Now, I have no idea whether $1/h/plane is reasonable (is that to cover the satellite comms, or is that on top of them?) but it is kind of stunning that planes aren't tracked automatically and as a matter of course the way, say, most people with cell phones are.
Governments have developed so much surveillance technology that they can easily invade the privacy of many citizens, yet tracking the exact whereabouts of planes flying in the sky - something that for scheduled, commercial flights whose routes should very much be publicly known information - still seems out of reach? I find that fact a little unsettling.
Nearly every country will shoot a plane that’s not identifying itself out of the sky. Especially after 9/11. It’s actually policy in a lot of countries now.
Generally would happen after a visual confirmation though.
Anyway, cars don’t carry the same type of power that planes do. Cars are being tracked in most countries anyway, just that the data isn’t public.
Finally there is nothing stopping you from making a “install this software on your webcams to monitor car locations” is there? If you’re so non hypocritical, go make that software and convince folks to run it, because that’s how airplane tracking happens.
Unless you’re arguing that planes shouldn’t carry radios with them and that countries should be fine with unidentified planes in their air space?
As has been repeated often, aircraft movement information is public.
None of this represents tracking his or his family's real time location, because:
a) We can't tell which aircraft he is on from that data.
b) He can use other aircraft, including charters.
c) This only applies to while the aircraft is actually airborne or departing from or arriving at an airport, which is already easy to observe and record by spotters, and does not track him or his family anywhere else.
It's about tracking a plane which ALREADY has its location tracked by a transponder and published publicly. Like every other non-military plane in the world. Nothing is unusual there, except that this data is posted to Twitter.
There is reasonable argument that it is not much difference between tracking someone car and tracking someone private jet. But super-rich are outgroup so most people who would strongly oppose the first case would not care in the second case.
The fact that there is flight data system is not much relevant, it could be modified to anonymize data.
_This aircraft (xxx) is not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator._
Which proves my point.
A motivated stalker will dig in and research but that’s inevitable, but the other 99.999% losers will self-limit to whatever is available for the minimum effort.
This translates to harmless yelling at clouds, unless some cheeky troll does the homework for them.
A very good point that embarrassingly highlights my lack of knowledge about it. Thank you for the correction.
I suppose a decent, easy system for evading its tracking would just be for rich people to swap keys to their private jets. Or chartering. Or flying commercial. Etc.
I think this whole thing could have been prevented if only the tracking systems could not have been turned off manually.
Why is that even possible? An oversight? If you think about just how many liberties we passengers had to give up after 9/11 worldwide, why was this still there? We can't take any liquids on board anymore but if the pilot wants, he can make the plane disappear at will? Yeah, the liquid thing was really the only security risk here...
Imho, tracking of planes should never be able to be turned off. Why should it? Could there ever be a situation were it would be vital to have these systems not running?
I think there's a hard public interest in tracking flights. They're so safe these days that we can kind of forget that we're talking about moving multi-ton vehicles over people's homes, churches, and schools, where anything going wrong can result in significant loss of life and property damage... At the very least, I want to know who and when as a societal tradeoff for the privilege of using the air over our heads freely.
(Also, that vested interest has been demonstrated in recent history. Keep in mind that it was ultimately plane-spotters who originally busted the extraordinary rendition policy of the US government open... They noticed planes had changed their regular flight patterns significantly).
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