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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

> On the commercial side, understanding how many aircraft landed in a city on a specific day can help predict economic trends

lol, as if you'd use satellite imagery for that and not just (freely) available data on airplane movement.

> assess the impacts of world events - such as the quantity of aircraft present for large sporting or entertainment events

wow, there were a hundred small airplanes in Las Vegas, there must have been an event there, who knew. Everyone knew and it's easily available information.

The application is military. That's the only thing this is good for. It's the only thing their screenshots show. Why not just say that.

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Not only military. Commercial transport aircraft can bring things in anticipation of an event not yet publicly announced, or such that won't ever be announced. Same applies even to Vegas: a dozen additional private aircraft may bring people to an invite-only event, which none of them is going to publicize.

OTOH all the commercial and GA aircraft should be visible on sites like flightradar. Military aircraft require much more involved detection techniques, especially as many of them are designed to avoid detection.

> should be visible on sites like flightradar

They censor. You can pay to exclude yourself.

Presumably one can also pay to unexclude some data? When "the price is right".

No real need when you adsbexchange has it anyway. Maybe they censor for an... unknown fee.

flightradar24 is still independent as far as I know. So I could see that.

Flightaware is owned by Rockwell Collins.

While I broadly agree, I think the era of general freely available data such as aircraft movements is about to end. We're entering an era of siloes.

I agree with your conclusion, but I'm really curious to know your reasons & predictions here. Can you elaborate?

The DOGE guy doesn't like it because people were tracking his plane and he also happens to be replacing FAA stuff with his starlink (which deorbits every 4 years and now will have more govt propping it up and guaranteeing redeployments, if the military stuff didn't already do that).

As long as I can stick a 1090 MHz ADS-B antenna on my roof and listen to transponders as they pass overhead (which I currently do), at least some data will be out there.

If your locale were to escalate to wartime-like measures for some reason (because of real threats, or some crazy/rogue leadership), couldn't recording aircraft movements and transmissions be suspicious, and sharing that data be suspected spying/treason?

Probably but then you'd have more pressing problems than just getting some flight statistics.

Also military planes on active war missions don't broadcast ADS-B for obvious reasons. We do sometimes see them on training missions though. Most platforms block them but ADS-B Exchange doesn't.

If anything, commercial / civilian planes would have ADS-B enabled near warzones so that those with anti-air know to avoid them. Didn't work for MH-17 though.

Is there freely available data on commercial & private airplane movement in India, China, and Russia? I'd be very surprised by that.

I see dense coverage on flightradar24 over India, China, and Russia. Can't say how complete is that.

Yes, although coverage is probably lacking in rural areas (eg https://globe.adsbexchange.com)

I'm surprised how good the coverage is over the mid Atlantic, far away from any hobby ADS-B receiver.

If you click, you’ll see it’s mostly sat ads-c:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenADSB/comments/kxrqi7/sat_adsc_t...

Thanks, I was not aware that even existed. That's a nice rabbit hole.

This would have applications for police for detecting unauthorized activities such as smuggling or movements of agriculture planes (chemical spraying) on private airfields. Assuming the planes are >25m.

That's the same category for me. The category that either gets people killed or violates people's rights in some way. It's not going to be used in any way that's a net benefit to normal people, only to the top 1% and the government.

>25m rules out all sprayer planes, all hobby planes, and anything smaller than a CRJ-700, like all private business jets.

It also rules out most military planes! Including the B21 Raider stealth bomber and F35.

So that limits it pretty much exclusively to large cargo aircraft, large passenger aircraft, and large military transport aircraft.

This is not terribly useful for anything other than tracking military logistics but only the US does that by planes in any significant manner.

That >25m is a giant limit they just kind of walk right past.

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