ACARS Drama | Hacker News Reader

ACARS Drama

acarsdrama.com

218 pointsjmwilson103 comments

Looks like you can "feed the drama" by sending unauthenticated JSON messages to an endpoint that the site specifies?

Fortunately, nobody on the internet has the urge to break things just for the hell of it, so I'm sure everything will be fine.

aaaand it's dead

From my experience the tailwatcher and (not) suprisingly related HAM communities are magical in their ability to just trust their community and rarely get burned.

Only 4 active connections allowed per site on a popular HAM webring? Never hogged by bots.

Site that allows minimally authenticated posting of aircraft ACARS messages? Never seen it hijacked for ads.

Physics-limited space for nearly untracable HF radio transmissions that can span half the US? Handfull of trolls that voluntarily relegate themselves to the 'troll freqs'.

It's no surprise the site allows unauthenticated JSON; in the rest of the hobby the FCC makes most types of security outright illegal.

HF is definitely traceable.

Hams make an entire sport of of this ("fox hunting"), and the FCC has a network of automated monitoring stations dotted across the country specifically to determine the location of rogue radio transmissions.

That said, most of the time it's easier to just ignore the radio trolls.

Yeah, but like other things, as long as the trolls stay in their corner, people tend not to bother them because better in a contained spot than anywhere else. Learning 7200kHz (and 14.313) is 4chan radio and to steer clear is a radio rite of passage; I doubt most people would WANT to fox hunt them because then they're gonna leave and potentially settle somewhere more disruptive.

> FCC has a network of automated monitoring stations dotted across the country specifically to determine the location of rogue radio transmissions.

While they can do this if they choose to do so, nothing at the FCC's Enforcement Bureau has a lower priority than amateur radio and CB.

For a long while I’ve had the plan to spam the hell out of the ingestion points for nonconsensual spyware/telemetry in open source projects, rendering the collected data useless. Been too busy to write the code the last few years.

Interesting that the keyboard for these[0] is not a QWERTY keyboard but instead has the buttons arranged alphabetically. That must be a pain in the ass to type in. Is that because the tech is 50 years old from before QWERTY was the standard? Do newer planes have QWERTY?

0: https://acarsdrama.com/fmc.webp

Unrelated, this one is cute: https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114194436695883209

Even if you did QWERTY, how would you arrange it in a 5x6 matrix?

I was imagining the panel could be designed such that you wouldn't need to fit it in a 5x6 matrix.

Avionics is the area that is the least tolerant of radical redesigns in human interfaces. This FMC form factor has been around a long time. There are newer ACARS/FMC systems that have an actual QWERTY keyboard.

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2016/04/27/spectralux-launches...

Remember, also, that not all countries use QWERTY. France, one of the homes of Airbus, uses AZERTY. What should they do about their keyboards?

Use bépo, of course! More seriously, Airbus uses qwerty since at least the A380. This means that the A350 and the A330, two aircrafts that share a type rating, do not use the same layout.

>Is that because the tech is 50 years old from before QWERTY was the standard?

QWERTY predates electronic devices.

True. Makes the decision even more baffling.

Keyboards in aircraft instrumentation certainly do NOT predate electronic devices. Given that one-handed operation for instrumentation is almost always the primary mode of interaction, and instrument panels are really just face-plates on quite deep electronic device containers, the idea of a widescreen panel hole profile just to fit the input keys in a different format/aspect ratio does not make sense.

Some of the most interesting aviation research in the past few decades have been around human factors like psychology, perception, and cognition. If there was some substantial effect to having the buttons be arranged in a different pattern, I do legitimately hope it would have been found by now.

Do keep in mind these devices are cost-prohibitive in the extreme to design, build, and certify. The idea of having separate, parallel processes in order to have a different button layout between regional devices creates a thousand headaches of its own, both before and after production. The issue goes even further, in that just the FAA alone requires simulators of these aircraft to have replicated button look and feel criteria that would make your head spin. Is there even going to be a question as to if you're going to have to have two simulators? Will type-ratings be transferrable? Will there be separate differences training and/or currency requirements between the two distinct input methods?

Some or even most of those answers might turn out favorably for manufacturers or operators or pilots. But just having to ask them drives costs up considerably.

These are all very good points. Thanks for explaining!

>if you're going to have to have two simulators? Will type-ratings be transferrable? Will there be separate differences training and/or currency requirements between the two distinct input methods?

Boeing found a way.

As a counterpoint... 50 or 60 years ago your average person wouldn't be familiar with QWERTY unless they were in one of a fairly small number of professions (secretary, author, journalist...). QWERTY was something you had to learn.

These days everyone types on a keyboard. It's way more universal, to the point where a non QWERTY layout has to impose additional cognitive load.

> These days everyone types on a keyboard

It was common to type on a keyboard also before, it just was a typewriter's keyboard.

QWERTY was invented to make input slower on mechanical devices and prevent the mechanical equivalent of a buffer overflow.

That's mostly a myth.

I've seen a YouTube video in the last couple of years that explained the true origins of the QWERTY keyboard. Originally, the keyboard was alphabetical and arranged two rows, based on a piano keyboard, the black keys went A-N left to right, and the white keys went O-Z, right to left. Then it got shortened in width and the letters got folded over (this is why at the right edge of the middle row you have HJKL and the bottom row has MN reversed as NM).

I'm not 100% sure this was the video I saw, but it has some of the points: https://youtu.be/c8f6us-Sjlo

This was posted a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43381088

Thanks - I wish I could find the video I watched. I think it had the information in that article, but in a more digestible format.

I always thought of it as more of a race condition.

> QWERTY was invented to make input slower on mechanical devices and prevent the mechanical equivalent of a buffer overflow.

This is sort of like saying a c compiler is there to stop you from dereferencing null pointers

> This is sort of like saying a c compiler is there to stop you from dereferencing null pointers

I like it! How else could we describe it?

C compilers exist to prevent developers from writing reliable code.

C compilers caught on because they allow geeks to act macho to other geeks.

C compilers exist because programmers on 32-bit systems were nostalgic for the DEC PDP-11.

C compilers exist because the industry worked out that fast code was way more lucrative than reliable code.

Anyone got more?

A lot of fighters have it even worse. Buttons around an MPD, or a T9-like system where number keys are overloaded for ~3 values each.

Yikes… “Type for me, Goose”

The RIO was literally only there to push buttons. The weapon systems were too complicated to operate while also flying the plane.

I think it’s long past time to reorder the alphabet to follow QWERTY order. It will make keyboarding much easier for children. We just need to write a new alphabet song.

Different languages have different keyboards (e.g. QWERTZ or AZERTY). I wonder what problems would happen if we reordered the alphabet...

For one thing the ASCII ordering is now suddenly jumbled up. Maybe our great supreme intellectual leader Elon will issue Magacode to supersede Unicode, kym epcy epc ngy vky yxcohy!

Sorting lists alphabetically would produce vastly different results by language, for one thing.

Already a thing for some languages. For example, Hawaiian sorts its letters as A, E, I, O, U, H, K, L, M, N, P, W.

Collation rules already differ by locale or language in many programming languages, libraries, and applications.

This is necessary because the order of words or characters is sometimes only sensibly defined if you know the language a text is written in.

Fun fact about character ordering:

Swedish sorting traditionally and officially treated v and w as equivalent, so that users would not have to guess whether the word, or name, they were seeking was spelled with a v or a w. The two letters were often combined in the collating sequence as if they were all v or all w, until 2006 when the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista (The Swedish Academy's Orthographic Dictionary) declared a change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet

How is it that Sweden seems dramatically more inclined to make major changes to things most other societies wouldn't touch?

I'm thinking of the Swedish calendar[1] and Högertrafikomläggningen[2] when they switched which side of the road they drove on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar: TL;DR: The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740... he Great Northern War stopped any further omissions... 1712 had 367 days... 1753... The leap of 11 days was accomplished in one step, with 17 February being followed by 1 March

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

That's pretty interesting, on the face of it its not a bad idea at all to just merge v and w... simplify language without losing much resolution.

although f and v would make more sense in terms of the actual sounds made?

> f and v would make more sense in terms of the actual sounds made?

Depends on the language. In German, f and v sound similar. And from your profile description I am guessing you are from the Netherlands, which I guess also might have f and v sound very similar to one-another.

In Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, we have pretty clear distinction between f and v.

Oooohhh!!! Back in the day I had an "opportunity" to implement a virtual CDU interface, even re-created that font to do it. It talked to a real FMC (and later anything on the ARINC 629 bus). Good times :)

I believe the A350 has it in qwerty.

The A380 even has a stowable full-size keyboard, as far as I know! Not sure if it can input data into this particular system, though.

but is it a mechanical keyboard? or type-by-wire?

> That must be a pain in the ass to type in.

You get used to it, same as you got used to a QWERTY keyboard.

(note: this based on my experience often interacting with another device with an alphabetic keyboard, not an FMC)

You do get used to it, but also the workflow is not entering words as much as it is things like waypoint codes, and a lot of numeric bits, which is why the number pad has its familiar layout.

> That must be a pain in the ass to type in.

Only until you're used to it. Then it's just as natural as switching between a keypad with a 1 in the top left versus one with a 7 in the top left. Your brain just takes the wheel.

Many people don’t realize that a phone number pad and a keyboard one are opposite. They just use them.

I've just realized, thanks to your messages, after years of using the without a second thought...

You don't really need to type long form text on it. The primary use of the keyboard on the MCDU is for the flight management computer, and aviation fix names are 3 or 5 letters at most. That is the primary design case for the keyboard. ACARS is secondary, and on a typical flight only a few long-form text messages are sent.

Every aircraft that I've ever flown has an alphabetical keyboard. Typically horizontal space is valuable, yet vertical space is less valuable, so it's easy to make the keyboard long but not wide. However, as others pointed out, it seems to be changing in newer jets.

QWERTY isn't universally used internationally, whereas the alphabet order is.

> whereas the alphabet order is.

I have news for you.

There are ACARS devices with qwerty. Like https://www.aeroexpo.online/prod/spectralux-corporation/prod...

Changing anything significant on an aircraft requires certification though. So you typically have to have a very good cause to do it.

My guess would be: QWERTZ touch typing was not a common skill in most pilots at the time these were introduced, and an ABC layout is slightly more ergonomical than QWERTZ for users not familiar with either.

Now that's changed, but changing the keyboard now would ruin older pilots' muscle memory.

You’re likely not touch typing with two hands anyway because it’s often down on the centre console. Besides they’re primarily used for entering flight info into the FMS, not for long form messages.

Very cool. I love these feeds.

A very common flow for me when I see something weird on adsb or fr24 is to grab the ICAO address of the plane and search it on https://app.airframes.io/ to see if it was sending out any ACARS messages so I can... see what the drama was ha!

It's a really fun hobby if you find this stuff interesting. You can pick up an SDR online for like $30 USD and be able to do all this without Internet, above your own home.

(and if you set it up on a raspberry pi and run it full time you can get a free business plan subscription to flightradar24)

https://www.flightradar24.com/add-coverage

Did anyone else mistakenly read this as “LCARS” and expect something related to the Star Trek interface?

Clearly I need more coffee.

Exactly.

Yep, me too.

Message: NO PROBLEM....DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY DELTA PILOTS IT TAKES TO TAXI A PLANE AND NOT RUN INTO ANYTHING...

https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114160399911092776

I knew watching every mentour pilot and blancolirio video would serve me well. I haven't yet heroically landed a plane after the pilots both had heart attacks, but at least I can read most of these.

!!!

Message: DISPMORNING. NEED LEO TO MEET THE AC. A PAX WAS INAPPROPRIATELY TOUCHING ANOTHER PAX IN THE ROW INFRONT OF THEM. THE FAS HAVE THE SEAT NUMBER ANDMANIFEST. FYI AND THX

https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114195325338601167

[edit: Ahh, its a Frontier flight] https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/keyword/N387FR

Related: Does anyone have the full message from Korean Air Flight 085 that contained letters HJK?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_085

There's something a bit off about this:

- I know what ACARS, is and understood less of what's going on here after reading the "What is ACARS drama?"

- It's an uncomfortable mirror, a reminder that not everything has to become puerile entertainment. I wouldn't call anything I read in the messages "drama"

- The odd obsession over framing it as "drama" & humorous, to the point it is difficult to understand the "what is this?", and collaborators are invited to "Feed the drama"

- Open endpoint for anyone to contribute "drama", meaning, anyone can feed anything they want, into this very official-looking feed, without any sourcing / clarification / anything

I see how this can read quickly as negativity unfairly directed at creative spirit, the motive power behind man.

What tipped me over into "well, it's worth expressing the ick" is that a full 20% of the comments, 14/64, are communicating, speculating, then riffing on, a passenger being molested.

I think you are overthinking a fun little project with a memeish name. This stuff is just super fascinating and entertaining to aviation nerds. And using “drama” in the name is just typical hyperbole and almost like gen z / internet slang that you find online.

Comments riffing on the LEO request for PAX TOUCHING PAX is just typical forum stuff. Not something that I condone and somewhat unsavory, but it’s the internet and people riff on much more horrible stuff online. Doesn’t mean it’s okay but just not a specific flaw of this project, imo…

I'm with you on this. I had to look up what ACARS is, but I've been following the ATC YouTube channels that try to make infotainment and I don't like it. I get that the public has an interest in what's going on, but I dislike that there are teams of people sitting around with monitoring software for the express purpose of finding mistakes and faults in people. It just seems wrong. And my guess is in the next few years, we will see pilots unions ask for encrypted channels because they will argue that stress of a national audience will affect their decision making.

What's the legality of this? I was thinking of doing something similar but with POCSAG but from what I can tell it would be illegal because of ECPA(Electronic Communications Privacy Act)

PT REPORTS CHEST PAIN RM318

It's broadcast in the clear, unencrypted. Just like all non-military aircraft comms.

> It's broadcast in the clear, unencrypted.

But so were analog mobile phones and pagers, and in some countries, even receiving unencrypted voice ATC radio isn't legal.

The whole point of ATC is that everyone in the area is able to figure out what is going on by listening in.

What/how is making listening in on that illegal ok?

Not sure about the details, but I suspect it's more a consequence of laws on telecommunication privacy from analog days being very generic than a specific intention to make ATC listening illegal. Opt-out vs. opt-in by frequency and/or purpose, essentially.

That said, it's supposedly still being very much enforced against e.g. planespotters at airshows in some places – no idea what the point of that is.

Baffling to get downvoted for a suspicion about the origins of the status quo, as if that were an endorsement of it.

Forget it up Jake, it’s Chinatown

ACARS isn't ATC traffic. It's semi-private communications with airline company dispatch. Text-based ATC communications is done over a different system called CPDLC (FANS-1/A).

That said, this is no different than listening to any other unencrypted, non-cellular radio traffic. Totally legal everywhere (except a few rare exceptions, like the UK).

And as I mentioned in my other comment, in the US the ECPA specifically says you can listen to aeronautical radio traffic.

> Totally legal everywhere (except a few rare exceptions, like the UK).

And (after a cursory search) Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, maybe France... In other words, legal in some places, illegal in others.

> Text-based ATC communications is done over a different system called CPDLC (FANS-1/A)

ACARS is both an application and a (legacy) lower layer suite of protocols supporting it, but modern ACARS versions and CPDLC can use the same underlying digital channel, as far as I understand (i.e. VDL Mode 2).

As a result, many of these tracking sites can capture both, as well as presumably "legacy/analog" ACARS.

Explicitly legal. ECPA has an carve out for listening to aeronautical radio traffic:

18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(g)(ii)(I/IV):

"It shall not be unlawful under this chapter or chapter 121 of this title for any person to intercept any radio communication which is transmitted by any station for the use of the general public, or that relates to ships, aircraft, vehicles, or persons in distress;... or by any marine or aeronautical communications system."

The ones recorded in the US probably are legal to listen to and the ones in the UK probably are not. I think I remember reading somewhere that it’s not legal to record ATC in the UK. IANAL SIUKRTCL

Message: HELLO..WIFI DOES NOT SEEM TO BE WORKING. ANY PROCEDURES TO RESET. THX

Message: LOOKS LIKE WORKING NOW. WE TURNED OFF THEN ON FROM FLT DECK THX

Different industries, same procedures :-D

https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114189077174169462

Also interesting to see, is a map of all ADS-B emergency broadcasts, which can be: ['general', 'nordo', 'downed', 'lifeguard', 'reserved', 'unlawful', 'minfuel']: https://adsb.exposed/?zoom=5&lat=38.3590&lng=-97.5146&query=...

Is it true, I have heard, that ACARS messages are like as expensive as sending data to Hubble, and airlines hate how expensive it is (hence it is not a viable method of transmitting more volumes of more desired data, like position data, regularly etc.) but have no great alternative that they can develop to replace it?

“HI. LAV A FLUSH HAS FAILED. NO SUCTION. CHEERS”

Well, that would be awkward.

Oh Jesus:

HOWDY, WERE GOING TO NEED LEO MEET THE AIRPLANE FOR A PERSON TOUCHING ANOTHER PAX.

Yep someone's going to be getting a little chat with the cops for getting handsy. And at 7am for goodness sakes!

Update:

DISPMORNING. NEED LEO TO MEET THE AC. A PAX WAS INAPPROPRIATELY TOUCHING ANOTHER PAX IN THE ROW INFRONT OF THEM. THE FAS HAVE THE SEAT NUMBER ANDMANIFEST. FYI AND THX

What about appropriate, consensual touching?

They don't record passengers' handshakes, no

Guess we can move from ACARS to ATC in a little bit...

https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=SEA

Could've been an international (overnight) flight. Maybe alcohol was involved.

nope, flight FFT2407 from Las Vegas to Seattle, 6:49 take off, 9:30 planned landing.

What started in Vegas didn’t stay there, and got ACARS’d.

someone on loads of blow still in their blood veins

that's nothing https://au.news.yahoo.com/woman-caught-breastfeeding-cat-pla...

Yup. See also:

NO VITALS. NO MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS ON BOARD

https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114200787168449171

Most of the messages I get.

By why show the ones with only an ETA and FOB? Is FOB code for something interesting?

FOB is Fuel On Board. Nothing interesting.

Ah that makes sense. Though it certainly doesn’t explain why those messages are worth showing.

Edit: oh they seem like small numbers. Like 24 or 36, I’m assuming hundreds of pounds?

Could it be they are displayed because they have relatively little fuel left?

Example: https://infosec.exchange/@acarsdrama/114196005649300274

Just routine updates to base for routing as needed. Hundreds/thousands of pounds on board. They plan their fuel usage fairly meticulously so base will use it in further calculations.

Dispatch could correlate it with the jet stream to see if they are getting good fuel consumption. If it's inefficient, subsequent aircraft might plan a different route.

Several years ago I saw a story about the a new record set for fastest Atlantic crossing by a subsonic civilian flight. And due to wind conditions it flew across the US instead of the polar route (it was like LAX to LHW). Basically they just flew with the jet stream and had such a good tailwind they had a supersonic ground speed. 6 or maybe even 700 mph. Their route was much longer than polar but was more efficient because they had a 150 mph tailwind.

<3 These are the jokes folks.

Maybe someday ACARS will support lowercase

Why does it need to? What value does that add?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com