There are not only Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. To attract millions of visitors and to achieve success on the platforms there are also the services that allow you to track flights. Once used by airport operators, pilots, aircraft owners, service managers, customers, they come now visited by millions of people who in this way control the departures, or the routes, verify the arrivals. They are also gods real social media: yes I can discuss impressions with other people you will participate forum.
Flight Aware with over 10 million users per monthis an American company that allows you to track both private and scheduled flights in real time in any corner of the world. It is also used by airlines and also provides weather forecasts and statistics. For pilots it allows planning, provides news, photos and a forum for discussions.
Its main competitor is FlightRadar24 which recently broke records by allowing you to follow the seven-hour flight by Nancy Pelosi from Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) to Taipei (Taiwan). 708 thousand people watched it simultaneously and it was partially seen by 2.92 million.
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It is not the only case. The flight of Alexei NavalnyPutin’s opponent, when he returned to Moscow where he was later incarcerated, reached the 550 thousand visits. Thousands have traced the drone americano Global Hawk that as soon as the war broke out the border between Donbass and Crimea monitored. The transfers of football teams, or those of various famous people.
Jack Sweeneya 19-year-old computer science student at the University of Florida, has created a bot that has identified all the movements of Elon Musk on Twitter reaching over 300,000 users.
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Musk offered Sweeney $ 5,000 to stop, but they were turned down. The information obtained by him, which he publishes on the canale CelebsJets it took this summer to calculate the emissions of famous peoplecome Taylor Swift e Kim Kardashian.
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These systems they also serve for financial speculation. In fact, hs are launchededge fund by analyzing the movements of company executives and speculating on their new businesses. This happened for example when Johnson & Johnson acquired Actelion in 2017.
The possibilities are many: Radar box, Plane Finder which allows you to filter based on the type of aircraft or airline, Flightstats which allows you to save your favorite routes. And then there are apps like Planes Live, which also tracks biplanes and Flight Board which instead communicates arrivals and departures.
Flight tracking can be achieved in various ways, including radar, transponder, identifiers such as serial number and registration, but they do not provide public data. Large-scale diffusion was allowed by the introduction of ADS-B technology (Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast) which allows you to locate the position with receivers that can be installed anywhere. ADS-B takes advantage of i satellites to determine the placement. It was originally developed to cover areas where there is no radar coverage, such as part of Alaska. Automatically send 1090MHz frequency information, without the need for an authorization and directly exploits the information provided by on-board systems, i.e. longitude and latitude, vector identification. Over 75 percent of flights have now adopted it and it is mandatory for many carriers in the US, India and Europe. A Future Market Insights report predicts that this sector, which has a market value of $ 358 million, will hit 611 by 2026.
The software that is used, to allow greater precision, combine different sources, including the information provided by the control towers. ADS-B Exchange, which in the Twitter channel it got 50 million messages last July, it manages to pass all the filters that airlines sometimes use because it doesn’t rely on what the airlines provide. And above all, it does not accept payments to cancel some flights. Instead, it has 8,500 volunteers. ADS-B receivers can be installed anywhere and for this we rely on the help of people who make themselves available. The larger the network, the more efficient monitoring can be.
Flight Aware makes use of 32 thousand stations ADS-B. The advantage is that these receivers can be built from a common single board computer like Raspberry, with little expense. It is therefore something that everyone can do, and after passively following the planes, it can be done actively. The recruitment campaign is always open.