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Comment by mitchellh | Hacker News Reader

All politics aside, I want to note that this is not a “little known” thing and I’ve never seen it talked about as a “loophole.”

I’m a pilot, I know hundreds more pilots. Most individuals who own a plane (even a Cessna that costs less than a car) know about and often use this program.

It’s very much well known in the aviation community. And outside of that I’d say it would be more surprising to people that the general public can track any aircraft public or private! (Imagine everyone’s car being able to be real time tracked by license plate by anyone anytime)

Now, bringing some politics in, it does feel like aircraft movement for the purpose of public government use should be documented and available.

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> Imagine everyone’s car being able to be real time tracked by license plate by anyone anytime)

Except ... every plane is being tracked in real time by the FAA (or other aeronautical organizations) for the good of both those on the plane and those around it.

The question is not whether such tracking happens or not, but merely whether the data is publically available. The analogy with cars would require that someone is actually tracking car positions, which as far as we know is not happening at any significant scale.

There was this funny Twitter account that was posting when dictators visited Geneve airport, but looks like it is taken down

https://x.com/gva_watcher

Exactly right. That’s what I’m saying. The tracking itself for air traffic control purposes has an obvious good purpose. The side effect that any random public individual can access this from their couch does not.

So, perhaps to reword my “imagine:” imagine the government required a tracker on every car, AND that data would be available to anyone in the entire world who wants it at anytime with no restrictions whatsoever.

> Exactly right. That’s what I’m saying. The tracking itself for air traffic control purposes has an obvious good purpose.

Except there often exists tracking even when ATC is not involved, e.g., a VFR flight.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Access_Transceiver

* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/researc...

I’m aware thank you. When I say air traffic I don’t mean exclusively ATC, I mean generally for all parties involved in air traffic (such as other pilots in the air). I don’t think such a use case exists for any person in the entire world on their couch.

> The tracking itself for air traffic control purposes has an obvious good purpose.

There's probably a way that the system could achieve the same safety benefits without invading privacy. Obviously, this FAA list is part of that. But there's probably even better tech that could achieve this too.

I'm not an aviation expert so I'll leave the details to those people. But we should be trying to find ways to improve the privacy of this system.

Give it time and people will try to justify real time tracking of all car traffic for "safety" reasons too...

> There's probably a way that the system could achieve the same safety benefits without invading privacy.

Probably, but the FAA and aviation in general leans towards "use the dumbest, most reliable technology possible" (for good reason, this isn't a dig at that). A relatively cheap wing-attachable beacon that beep boops on a frequency with no handshakes, encryption, etc. is one of the simplest possible thing.

Look at the fact that piston engines in aircraft still use magnetos and manual mixture controls. :) There's a ton of literature on that, we've had real world examples of more reliable alternatives, and yet... Luckily magento replacements such as SureFly are making some headway (after long, long long last). But they're a tiny tiny part of aviation today.

Yes. A good example is the continued use of AM modulation for aviation radio. While bandwidth inefficient, the failure modes of AM modulation are easy to understand and predictable, which is good for safety.

But, even then, there may still be something clever that can be done to improve privacy without something as heavy-weight as, say, encryption. We should be open to the possibility.

I'm not into aviation, but if this is about planes broadcasting their position publicly, I would imagine it's beneficial not just for the traffic control towers, but also for other pilots flying around in the area that can receive those signals, in case they're ever not within range of a working tower. It works as a redundancy option, for safety.

It also works in case there's unlicensed, radio-silent flyers, which is bad, but you turn a bad situation worse if they can't get info on what other aircraft they might bump into.

The unencrypted broadcasting of their position is like a trailer beeping as they're backing up. It's an alert for others to pay attention to them and stay out of their way.

At the bottom of the article, it’s noted that lawmakers very recently removed the ability to determine the owner of a tail number.

Thanks! That's a good step.

Cars are being tracked at significant scale. Police and private entities commonly use ALPR systems and that data gets fed back to the manufacturer for resale on the capitalist surveillance market. Combine that with an IMSI catcher and you can derive identities without access to the license plate database. This works in conjunction with vehicles that have cellular modems sending GPS position to the manufacturer, for resale, and phones that send GPS position to the network operator, for resale. The non-flying public is extensively tracked.

You’re a pilot, you can probably think of some differences in the way aircraft operate versus roadcraft, that makes tracking them a much more reasonable proposition.

> It’s very much well known in the aviation community

Do you think the article is speaking primarily to the "aviation community"?

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