What's going on at Heathrow Airport | Hacker News Reader

What's going on at Heathrow Airport

blog.billyedmoore.com

20 pointsBillyedmoore11 comments

A few months ago I created a simple website https://lhr.billyedmoore.com/ that uses a small machine learning model to predict how Heathrow is using its runways. I wrote this blog post about it.

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When all you have is AI everything looks like a model, but this is trivially done with basic text parsing...

This info is in the automated weather broadcast (ATIS) audio for any towered airport.

Most large airports provide a textual version (D-ATIS), so suitably equipped pilots don't have to listen to it and scribble it down.

E.g. Heathrow now from random unofficial website: https://atis.guru/atis/EGLL

EGLL ARR ATIS T 1820Z LANDING RWY 27L…

EGLL DEP ATIS U 1427Z PILOTS ARE EXPECTED TO CHANGE TO RWY 27R AT AT 15:00 HOURS… DEPARTURE RWY 27L…

I spent about 15 minutes trying to determine where this photo was taken. The focal length used really obscures how far away the plane and the building behind it actually are. Eventually I figured it out based on the snippet of taxiway you can see touching the runway and verified it against your LinkedIn.

I used to have an office slightly offset from the final approach path of the local airport with a window that gave an amazing view. I'd leave my airband scanner on as background noise while I worked in a very quiet, mid-covid office.

> Since I could tell which “state” the airport is in from looking at flightradar clearly there is a pattern. However the pattern is not easily definable [..]

Errm, what? "Not easily definable"? Based on what?

I've just opened FR24 and in less than one second I can tell that they're currently doing Westerly ops, which isn't a surprise.

Arrivals: 27L Departures: 27R

You don't need to "predict" what they're doing, you just need to look at where the aircraft lining up to land, and (on the other runway) where they're departing from.

(Full disclosure: have done many hundreds of LHR flights over the years...)

any memorable moments? one of mine was noticing we were circling for about 15 mins, then I realised we had to fly into what looked like a massive nimbus cloud. It was the realisation that gave me a good memory , all fine tho

Yes fair cop, I did experiment with different heuristics for this. I couldn’t get anything to work reliably but I do suspect it is possible.

Fucksake. When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, &c

[stub for offtopicness]

(submitted title was "Predicting how Heathrow is using it's runways in the browser")

If you're going to editorialise your own title, at least use the correct "its".

Using runways in browser seems a bit strange to me

My bad. Was trying to keep the title from being too clickbaity.

No worries! It's not easy to predict these things and we're not always right either.

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