A plane flying over Germany drawing a Christmas tree

Could be a "string" to hand the tree. Like a car air freshner.

I wonder if they just couldn't get clearance to criss-cross Hamburg's airspace enough for the star.

I think in Germany it's just as serious.

For a much simpler threat model, the FAA is also deadly serious about laser illumination of aircraft and will involve local law enforcement and the FBI. Don’t let your buddy who got some crazy powerful laser pointer be stupid and point it toward an airplane or helicopter.

It's certainly real, the flight path is being tracked in real time by thousands of receivers. You'd need to fly around your transponder to make that, at which point it's not illegal any longer. But if you started DDoS'ing a single point in airspace you're going to go to jail very quickly.

> You'd also be trolling the air traffic control system

The safe way of avoiding that is to inject it directly into the FR24 feed, rather than broadcasting it as ADS-B.

A considerable proportion of their data is receiving from end-users running their own receivers, rather than the FR24-branded receiver. They do reject spurious data from one receiver but genuine-looking data would be hard to detect and discard.

I was thinking of this exact talk. IIRC, He never gets a hold of the more expensive plane-to-plane transmitters and of course, he wouldn't transmit anything on them if he did, but he does bring up a lot of concerns and I'm wondering what the FAA and other countries orgs have in place to detect malicious signals, track them and stop/arrest them.

Definitely plausible for ATC installs.

Not true. Done this. Never have been found.

I guess it's similar to the AIS signals used by ships.

Not so. A PKI could have been put in place and would have allowed "strangers" to securely authenticate and set up a secure session, but I suppose the expense was not deemed worthwhile. Also possible is that such a session would be point-to-point, and an area handshake, while possible, would have been less reliable and more complex, while also loading the bandwidth with more radio traffic and thus increasing the noise floor overall. ATC running costs would have increased as well.

So it's not that it couldn't be done or is inherently insecure, it's that a choice was made (either by omission or by intent) to not do it.

Yes. At which point, the pilots will see what is going on, take manual control, gather data for ATC's inevitable response, and use traditional instruments to navigate the airplane to a safe landing. Passengers would likely be unaware. In the United States, a report would subsequently be filed with the ASRS.

Both couple and few can mean either a specific number (2 for couple, 3 for few) or an indeterminate small number. They are synonyms for the second usage.

Several. Or "a bunch". Or "more than a dozen".

Regardless of whether people will use a "couple" to mean an indeterminate small number that may be more than exactly two, it doesn't mean 16 jets, as 16 is a large number of jets to be doing something together, unless one is intentionally understating. How many planes are in the air at a time? "A couple"

> Also, flight radar, especially at the zoomed out views, looks a lot more crowded than it really is, the airplane-icons are huge.

Plus, you can stack them on top of each other at different altitudes.

I used to see similar on the approach to Heathrow when I was fly fishing at Syon Park in West London.

One of the great things about the Berlin airlift is the way that they invented a huge amount of what is now standard high-capacity aircraft handling, on incredibly short notice (and in order to accomplish something fairly heroic). This includes things like standard routes and approaches, diversion procedures, pure-IFR (instrument) operations, and more. The family resemblance between arrivals to Newark Airport and Tempelhof is not accidental.

(Which reminds me, cycling down the runway at Tempelhof is still on my bucket list. I should go to Berlin this summer...)

I wish I had saved the URL, but when the 787 was being tested, the flight test team had a public-facing website that gave a lot of very interesting information about the test protocols and how they were being run.

Imagine a flight team basically waiting with bags packed, for the right atmospheric conditions to appear anywhere in the world to fly there and go through a set of test cases.

The capital Chi is Χ, which is indistinguishable from X in most fonts, and even more so in handwriting.

LaTeChi?

"Seems you've also wasted power and contributed CO2 as well?"

CO2 alone assuming there are no hot chilli involved:)

edit: on a more serious note, companies don't waste fuel for no reason, so I'm sure it was a test flight which they decided to fly in a creative way to bring more eyes to the brand. People wandering around every day, every year, in elephant sized pickups doing things a small car would be enough for are a much worse source of pollution.

Well it is still a very expensive thing to do :)

"In case there was any doubt, the US Navy has confirmed that there is 'zero training value' in drawing penises in the sky."