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How FlightAware / FlightRadar24 work...

Started by cagarini, Sat, 4 Jan 2020 20:10


Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers

Aireon is a network of ADS-B "in" receivers in low Earth orbit, piggybacking on the 66 Iridium NEXT satellites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aireon
https://aireon.com/

It was quite a gamble whether it would work at all, as none of the existing ADS-B "out" transmitters deployed on aircraft was ever designed to be receivable from 781 km altitude. But the gamble paid off big time. Several air traffic organisations, including NavCanada, now are already developing virtual radar consoles and training their controllers to move from a position-report-based procedural method (like that one over the oceans) to radar separation, but based on this fake ADS-B radar without ground stations. I see this happening over the Atlantic in less than a decade, too. The tech is already there, I've seen live demos, you can literally see that two aircraft in trail are each using a different SLOP offset, it's that accurate.


Hoppie