They're people in small planes practicing.
Also, I live near several military bases. The interesting and loud stuff that I see flying by out my window NEVER shows up on any app. I expect this web site is similarly, deliberately, incomplete.
When it comes to military aircraft, the situation there is kind of interesting. There's no general exception for the military, military aircraft are generally "required" to transmit ADS-B unless they have a specific reason not to (and I believe this requires authorization from somewhere up the chain of command). I put "required" in scare quotes though as many military aircraft are simply not equipped... the DoD has drug its feet on installing ADS-B out and the FAA has basically relented by setting very lax objectives. FAA requested DoD to have ADS-B installed on 21% of aircraft by the first of this year and I believe they met that goal... but it's still less than a quarter.
Over time more and more military aircraft should be appearing in ADS-B data, but I suspect it's going to be some years before it's almost all of them.
C172 and C182 both make fine planes for running surveillance. They're inexpensive (to buy and operate), reliable, inconspicuous, and have enough space and useful load to tack on specialized equipment. I used to own a 182 that was originally owned by the Washington State Police. While in WSP service, it was modified to have an automotive-style muffler for "stealth" surveillance.
The step up are the B1900s that CBP has which have additional sensor capabilities.
According to him, the state much preferred to take cops and turn them into pilots, than to take pilots and turn them into cops. But anyone who wanted to go that route had to pay for their own flight time. (Commercial rating requires 250 hours, and I think they wanted at least a hundred hours "time in type." I don't think they required an ATP rating, but my recollection about that could be incorrect.)
However, if you have a full-sized drone I would love to buy a kit from you.
Perhaps less incomplete than you think (and certainly more complete than the standard tracking websites, which outside of hiding planes also must honor a 5-minute data delay requested by the FAA).
The advisory circular bots the author runs link to https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com/ , which is run from a home-grown network of SDRs. It makes a point of not hiding anything that reports its position with ADS-B -- which all aircraft (over a certain size) must report by law. I've even seen Air Force One and its escorts on this service, something that is always absent from other flight tracking services.
Can you expand on this for the noobs in the subject?
why the downvotes? this was the actual stated reason when this was requested
For anything not broadcasting ADS-B, you can use multilateration (time difference of arrival) to determine positioning of dumb transponders. Flightaware does this [1].
Anyway, it's possible that the reason was no so much ground-to-air missiles but rather ground-to-air weapons. In other words, idiots trying to shooting guns at airplanes or put up balloons in their path.
I tried briefly googling, but while it's easy to find others talking about the delay [1], I didn't find a why confirmation
[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/3052/is-there-a...
Most data on FlightAware, for instance, is from ADS-B feeders run by average folks. FlightAware takes this data and turns around to sell it for a boatload of money to people that manage fleets and want to know exactly where their plains are at. In order to ensure there isn't dropouts in coverage, FlightAware pays the FAA to feed them data that they can't get from ADS-B feeders, for example when a plane is not in range of any feeder. As a condition of the FAA giving them access to this data they must abide by the FAA's rules, one of which is filtering planes in which the owner has requested their tracking data not be made public.
Interesting fact, if you feed then you like contribute to FlightAware locating the position of an aircraft not emitting ADS-B, but with a Mode S (?) transponder. This is known as M-LAT, or multilateration. Because of FlightAware getting FAA data and being bound by FAA terms they won't return the position of the plane that you helped them locate, assuming the owner of that aircraft requested privacy. So essentially you help provid them the data that they can sell access to the owner of that aircraft, but you don't get to see that same data. Sites like ADSBExchange, which the OP app uses, do not source FAA data, and so are not bound by such crappy terms.
As another commenter noted, not every aircraft advertises itself using ADS-B, but the majority do - even military. I’m no expert here, but I think the distinction is that military aircraft operating outside of civilian airspace don’t need to. But some do anyway - I’ve seen a U-2 flying at 62k feet over the Southwestern US show up on ADS-B exchange. There’s no need for it to do so, as no civilian aircraft flies at altitudes that high.
Is this true? Seems like an unambiguous violation of the first amendment. Someone can't report on raw data that they can receive with an SDR? Has this been litigated?
This only applies to FAA-provided data. And I'd not be surprised if it's simply enforced by the FAA only providing 5-minute delayed data.
Tracking sites that use ADS-B are definitely realtime. My kids and I sit outside on the patio sometimes and track the planes coming at our house (we're pretty close to one of the standard ingress routes to PDX).
Things flying near an airport are excluded ("The centroid of the last 3 minutes worth of positions must be more than 2.5 km away from all known airports."). I've never seen it tweet about planes doing obvious pattern practice.
This is what the standard training circuit looks like (it's basically a rectangular-ish shape)[1]
This is the type of orbit pattern that is used for search and rescue (SAR) or surveillance (a near-perfect circle, like the ones in the OP) [2]
[1] http://www.ppl-flight-training.com/circuits-briefing.html
[2] page 127 of this pdf ("Creating an Orbit Pattern") https://static.garmin.com/pumac/190-01007-03_r.pdf
(defn curviness
"Computes the total curvature of a sequence of headings."
^double [headings]
(Math/abs
^double (reduce (fn [^double sum [^double a ^double b]]
(let [d (heading-diff a b)]
(if (spurious-heading-diff d)
sum
(+ sum d))))
0.0
(partition 2 1 headings))))
Usually in urban areas there's a more or less formal designated practice area where people are doing these things, intentionally not near the airport, but you could filter out small aircraft in those areas if it was really an issue.
The slightly interesting stuff doesn't show up, the loud jets, but the really interesting stuff does. CIA rendition flights, police spying on protests, Air Force One, rich people flagrantly violating COVID rules ... they all squawk ADS-B.
So, instead of being trackable N123AB, I could fly as DCM965. You could still potentially trace approximately where the aircraft flew (because there aren’t quite enough DCM flights for real anonymity), but it’s more work.
https://www.planeandpilotmag.com/article/privacy-lost-in-the...
I can enter a new aircraft ID into the box for each flight. That data is then transmitted in bits 9-32 of the ADS-B downlink message (where the N-number is typically transmitted for private aircraft).
Yes, you can change the hex code your aircraft is broadcasting, but the FAA probably won't like that - they will want you to join the PIA program. https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/privacy/
If you don't do all three of those things and keep transmitting your N-number via ADS-B, then you are trackable by N-number. That DCM2790 is using the same flight number for multiple legs and transmitting their N-number is evidence that they aren't maximizing privacy, not that privacy isn't possible.
Don't know if there is an "app", but regarding the interesting stuff, it's the most complete, IMO/E.
Most of the helicopters belong to either TV stations or city/county/state police. There's also medevac, but they don't circle much.
A few weeks ago I was watching an F-35 off the coast of Southern California... so cool to see that stuff. It seems to also pick up weather balloons (or some kind of balloons that are above 60,000ft). Anyway, it's fun to see what's out there.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2019/08/19/military-2936-aircr...
Are there several? If so what was the key features you were looking for?
I have seen some military aircraft light up while practicing refueling over the pacific, but go dark when leaving or returning to base.
1. Not move there because of flight training schools.
2. Lobby to get the flight training school to practice over unpopulated areas.
I did some flight lessons in rural Manitoba. You got ~45 minutes of flight training for every hour you paid for.
Then I considered restarting them once I moved to Toronto... you get about 20, 25 min of training for every paid hour - the rest is just getting out of restricted space. If you wanted to head to actual "unpopulated area", I think you'd need to book a 3 hour lesson in order to get any actual training. Completely unfeasible.
And this is in Canada, a famously sparsely populated nation. It feels even less feasible for majority of more densely populated countries.
(basically, by definition, if you only allow flight training in the unpopulated boonies, you'd deny it to a very large super-majority of population. One may view that in positive or negative light, of course)
Why is this unfeasible?
Paying 3 hours of very expensive flight training to obtain 30min of actual flight instruction should be unfeasible at plain sight, but fair enough - the next level of detail is "makes it unaffordable, impractical, and is a strong deterrent for vast majority of interested parties".
This is fairly typical — even in urban centers there's typically one or more "training areas" for students to practice maneuvers. e.g. in New York: https://i.imgur.com/Djum5pX.png