Radar online
 

Hello all,

Im not ATC just an architect with a few hours PPL.

Im here sitting at my desk at "lunch" watching radar online through an interesting site operated 24 hours *cough*.

Most airliners are shown, some private jets, and some small civilian types... but there are a few military flights....one interesting one has been a US Navy Mercury flight (GOTO) out of Stuttgart routing to North West Scotland, race track pattern for an hour then back to base. A US Air Force flight (DUKE) out of the same to Shannon, and back, and a Quinetic Avrojet a few times doing circuits. And a new Royal Air Force Voyager out of Bournemouth doing "maneuvers" out over the western approaches. Can also observe the "Jennifer flights out of Las Vegas if you know what I mean" off to interesting places.

Do the various aircraft both civilian and military that appear on this radar site accept they are being tracked publicly or do ATC filter this and the various military/civilian traffic?

Public technology is an incredible thing especially when tracking a friends flight or watching whats coming overhead where I live/work or watching the military comings and goings.

happy flighting,

Coley.

No filtering is done. What you see on the site are what is being picked up from home users of ADS-B receivers.

Is it not "Janet" flights from Vegas?

The way it works is that a number of enthusiast have real-time gadgets which receive radar-type transmissions from aircraft. Many of these include details of callsign, altitude, speed, etc. They then feed this stuff via the internet to the various sites, such as FlightRadar24, which then streams it on the internet. Well, that's roughly what happens unless you want to get technical. Many aircraft will not appear for various reasons.

ATC have nothing to do with this as they have their own specialised radar systems.

Makes for interesting watching though. On of my guys was pax on a Norwegian 73 flying into Gatwick a couple of weeks ago and with internet being available on the a/c was not only tracking his own flight but could identify all the other stuff flying around him.

Problem I had when in Barbados at Christmas was that not only was "Planefinder" very patchy (about 1 flight in 10) but Ship Finder was equally poor.

Thank you one and all....and yes, I had a momentary lack of situational awareness...it is "Janet"...could have said "Julian" and id have everyone thinking Julian Clarey had his own fleet!!

Flightradar24 is the one Ive been watching....didnt know it was a hackers site, although it does make me appreciate that even if its only half of whats flying around, just what a job you guys and girls take care of hour by hour.

Coley.

One extra point. What you see is often delayed by 5 minutes or so.

I've not noticed any delay. I have compared Plane Finder and Flightradar24 to the displays in the ops room and they seem pretty much bang on to me.

I understand from the Flightradar site that the FAA side of things may have a delay factor, but most things that pass overhead by me (GIBSO) are pretty much spot on.

Coley

The orange ones are delayed and the yellow ones are on time...

Are the delayed orange ones the Easy-jet flights? :E

Correct. Real-time FAA radar data is only made available to a closely controlled circulation, and needless to say that doesn't include the enthusiast community.

Data derived directly from the network of ADS-B receivers is normally distributed with little or no delay, other than the latency of the networks, although when such receivers originally became available 7-8 years ago they did incorporate a 5-minute delay (now removed) to the external data stream intended to power client applications.