Real-time SFO plane location | Hacker News Reader

Real-time SFO plane location

airportviewer.com

89 pointsmooreds43 comments

Pretty cool. For those wondering the source of the data, it is likely ASDE-X/ASSC streaming in from the FAA's STDDS SWIM feed[0]. The terminal and ground data is especially cool and not as common as the usual flight tracking you see of en-route aircraft.

I'm using the STDDS feed to build a rough "go-around detector" in AWS for approaching aircraft by monitoring each approaching aircraft glide slope and dispatching a SNS notification "if currAlt > prevAlt".

If anyone has any questions about this stuff feel free to reach out, my email is in my profile. The easy part (IMHO) is slurping in the data which only requires a couple small EC2's and RDS, ~$125/mo. The hard part is often the presentation and making demos like these fun and shareable.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/swim/stdds/

Typically FlightAware shows planes on the ground as well. Can you elaborate on what the difference here is?

I don't think I've seen FlightAware showing aircraft tracks on the ground.

They do show taxi times for arriving/departing aircraft and I wonder if they are stitching that data together using the STDDS feed.

To give you an example, for an arriving aircraft you would get an alert of "wheels down", which is as literal as it sounds: a timestamped event when the aircraft made contact with the ground. In addition to ground position events (allowing the tracking you see here), you would also receive an alert when the aircraft left the tracked movement surface, i.e. transitioned to the gate/ramp area and no longer on an active airport surface.

(Pretty sure I have that correct, it's been awhile since I got back to my STDDS-powered projects. If anybody familiar with STDDS wants to chime in, please do!)

For the curious, all these "alerts" are JMS messages with XML payloads. Pretty much non-stop stream of data, incredibly fun if you're a developer+av geek. For FlightAware-style tracking without using any ADS-B you'll want to subscribe to the SFDPS feed. You'll get position updates every 60 sec for all airborne flights in the US, which last week amounted to ~40GB in my Postgres DB. You can request higher resolution reporting which is every 12s.

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.

Are there any OSS packages to ingest this feed?

Good question. I haven't stumbled upon any, but it's possible they are out there.

The FAA offers a sample client. Depending on your level of skill, the hardest part might be the onboarding with the FAA which includes establishing a site-to-site VPN between your network and theirs. Once that is setup and some other networking is configured, you can use their Java demo client with the credentials they provide to get the hang of it.

The source of data is an event queue, powered by Solace, using Java's JMS standard. You can write a little bit of a Java to parse the incoming messages to get to the XML payload. Honestly I found that part to be the easiest and the Linux networking parts (as part of the VPN) to be the most difficult.

I wrote up a bit of a guide here, it's a little rough and high-level but I hope it helps clarify things a bit if you feel like working with these feeds/data.

http://www.route3software.com/faa-swim-getting-started-guide...

Are you allowed to rebroadcast the data? Does the FAA charge for the data?

Is your go-around detector data public anywhere?

One thing to note is the presence of ground vehicles (e.g. "OPS7"). Using my RTL-SDR dongle, I can pick up trucks driving around LAX, 20 miles away, because the airport is creating synthetic ADS-B targets for them and broadcasting packets as though they were any other aircraft--with appropriate flags sent so you can tell 1. it's a ground vehicle, and 2. it's a synthetic target, not a direct response from an ADS-B transponder.

If ground vehicles don’t have their own ADS-B transmitter, what method do they use to announce their GPS positioning data to whatever is transforming that into ADS-B data?

And for the real aviation geeks, bring up the KSFO live tower audio here: http://d.liveatc.net/ksfo_twr2

(via: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo)

That's awesome. Any idea why there are different audio streams in the L/R channels?

The linked stream is the Tower/Ground stream. Tower is on the left channel, Ground is on the right.

Would be nice to see them combined, vs. running in separate tabs ...

You can pick this stuff up with a cheap RTL-SDR - it’s the ADS-B transponder on the planes. I believe services like FlightAware use this to track planes too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveill...

https://github.com/antirez/dump1090

http://www.satsignal.eu/raspberry-pi/dump1090.html

https://flightaware.com/live/map

Yup, I had a lot of fun playing with a €10 RTL-SDR device - from my flat I can see a lot of planes arriving/departing at Helsinki airport.

The only (minor) annoyance is that when they start to fly too low I can't pick them up any more, so I see them get very close to the airport, but then they just disappear.

I don't think this is completely ADS-B; comparing KSTL on airportviewer[0] with FlightRadar24[1], FR24 doesn't have any ground tracks so I wonder if their data comes elsewhere.

[0]http://www.airportviewer.com/airport/KSTL [1]https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/stl/map

Here is what they use:

http://www.mosaicatm.com/commercial-solutions/viewer/

It basically just uses the transponder, so it will be mode-C or mode S (ADS-B). Right now most commercial planes have ADS-B, and 100% of them will have it after 2020.

I think the main issue with FR24 is that you'll only pick up ADS-B signals within line of sight, so there may not be any receivers near KSTL. If you compare KSFO you'll see lots of ground activity on FR24:

https://www.flightradar24.com/airport/sfo/map

At one time, one of the apps (FlightRadar24, maybe?) would send you a free radio receiver, as long as you hooked it up to the internet so they could get the data, too; and you lived in an area that wasn't well covered.

You have to supply your own hardware, but Flightaware provides a Raspberry Pi image that does that (you get a free subscription if you send them ADS-B data).

https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/

Yep that was FR24, I applied there and got accepted but then moved away and had to cancel that. I'm not sure if they are still doing it.

One of my favorite personal projects was to do this with an ADS-B receiver, Raspberry Pi, Android App, and a laser projector to show overhead flights on my ceiling:

https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/891863458005655553

It made practicing forgiveness for loud airplane noises much easier :)

really awesome... do u have a blog/writeup for how u did it?

https://www.flightradar24.com/build-your-own to get the data... the visualization... I'd love to see a write-up as well!

This isn't surveillance in the "security camera open to the web", but actually just plane positioning.

Thanks, I updated the title.

Just for comparison, here's someone that has stitched the ADS-B information with Prepar3D (used to train air traffic controllers) and a bunch of other glueware and turned it into a live YouTube feed of LAX:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQQK0iR5iBU

These pages each show data from on-airport surveillance systems Airport Surface detection Equipment, Model X (ASDE-X) or Airport Surface Surveillance Capability (ASSC) which show aircraft and vehicles on the airport surface and within a few miles of the airport. It does include ADS-B but unfortunately not all US carriers are equipped yet.

What's the difference with https://www.flightradar24.com/37.62,-122.38/15 ?

Not the OP, but maybe the absence of ads?

Looks pretty similar thought flightradar doesn't show the airplane id unless you click on the plane.

There are several differences if you watch closely. First you will see a more complete picture of the aircraft movement on the surface. Second you will noticed the flightradar attempts to predict where aircraft are going while the airportviewer only reports where the aircraft says it is.

FYI, there are also 36 other airports viewable from this app: http://www.airportviewer.com/

http://webtrak5.bksv.com/ <- multiple airports with both near realtime and historical data, flight paths, etc.

Cool! I wonder whether this could use some sort of extrapolation so the planes move smoothly between updates?

Others listed are faster but here is another one. http://volans.airportnetwork.com/JS3D/VolansPublicSFO.html

Just looks like ADS-B Data. Neat but hardly new. Lots of sites out there already. For a few bucks you can build your own receiver and collect/visualize the data.

FlightRadar24.com is a much better interface and shows all the planes... in the world.

I have an ADS-B receiver and I transmit my data to both FR24 and FlightAware.

While the the title suggests something different, it looks pretty cool anyway, but someone should really look into adding some animations ;-)

Didn't know Oakland airport is directly across the bay!

With Norwegian flying London - Oakland, and the link up with the BART making it potentially even faster to get to Embarcadero, it's a really great option over SFO!

Yup; You can get nonstop from Oakland to Reykjavik (KEF) and also Stockholm (ARN) I believe. No doubt Norwegian also flies OAK to somewhere in Norway.

They even have a cute little lounge there for the premium passengers nowadays (shared with BA; a couple of flights a week to London Gatwick).

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