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Old 26th Feb 2010, 01:23
  #9 (permalink)  
Wheels Down
 
Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: Sydney
Age: 72
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From the Nutter, Loon or Legend himself.

My primary interest in ACARS is technical, I have a receiver monitoring 2 frequencies at once, a laptop translating the data, and a synchronisation program to upload it to my website every 15 minutes in summary form (all done automatically 24/7 with no human intervention). This provides a lot of rich flight and registration information and is used by many local photographers who need extra help to identify an aircraft. In addition, any ACARS position information is also uploaded and plotted on Google Maps. The same ACARS information is also being fed to Plane Plotter where a static radar like plot of the YSSY area is updated every 15 minutes. This is all freely available at www.16Right.com

The Sydney Message Board thread came about because I had noticed some interesting, be it funny or technical, transmissions in the log. I posted some of these and people were interested, so it just grew naturally. Best look at The Best Of ACARS 2009 to get the flavour of things (you will need to scroll down a bit to see the item).

As for privacy, ACARS is just part of the technical working environment for flight crew, it is not secure, however only the staff of the particular airline would have access to company records to track a transmission down to individuals. It's a bit like me using email and intranet in the corporate environment, I choose and am responsible for what I say, and always think about the audience who will see the information. I always remove actual names and do not post anything I think is too personal (eg. Air New Zealand emails). I had a nice email from an Air New Zealand crew member who had sent one of the emails I posted, he was cool about it and interested in the technical side of things.

For me personally, flying is a passion, I gained my Private Pilots Licence at 16, and 43 years later, still fly myself where ever I want, when ever I want. I am also into aviation photograph, over 1,050,791 people have downloaded my images from www.Airliners.net, and I am a regular contributor to Australian Aviation magazine.

Nutter, Loon or Legend, everyone has their own opinion.
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