Finding and Exploring ADS-B data

Planes are overhead frequently. It's easy to look-up at a passing contrail and wonder where it's going. Thanks to a radio transponder now present on most aircraft called Automatic dependent surveillance—broadcast, or ADS–B, it's possible to crunch data about the planes around us. Passenger flights, cargo, military or the small Cessna flying overhead: it's possible to find their flight paths and ownership records.

We'll talk about how hobbyists can get at ADS-B data and what they might do with it. We'll also consider, briefly, how accident investigators can use ADS-B data to fill-in details of what happened when a plane crashes.

Transcript

1. Finding and exploring ADS-B data Nathan L. Walls All Things Open – Oct. 14, 2019
2. Data from the Cloud(s)
3. Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast
4. Finding and Exploring ADS-B Data • How I learned about ADS-B and became interested in it • What ADS-B does • What ADS-B looks like • Acquiring ADS-B data • Data and visualization possibilities
5. This is an exploration, not expertise
6. A high-level overview
7. How I became interested
9. Accident Reconstruction
11. What ADS-B does • ADS-B is divided into two services • Traffic (TIS-B) • Weather/Flight Information (FIS-B)
12. What ADS-B / FIS-B does • Provides in-flight weather information • Airborne pilot reports (PIREPS) • Doppler Radar images (NEXRAD) • Significant weather info (SIGMET) • Thunderstorms • Icing
13. Other FIS-B info • Notices to Airmen (NOTAMS) • Automated Terminal Information System (ATIS)
14. We’re going to focus on ADS-B Traffic (TIS-B)
15. What ADS-B / TIS-B does • Old radar-based method: Radar-based interrogation of each aircraft’s transponder • New ADS-B-based method: Each aircraft reports on itself
16. ADS-B/TIS-B advantages • Decreased reporting time for position changes vs. radar • Higher positional fidelity to air traffic control, allowing for less space separation • Aircraft can see each other’s ADS-B data and present pilots with a representation of aircraft around them without air traffic control
17. ADS-B by example
18. What’s that plane?
19. ADSB Exchange
23. FlightAware
24. Let’s look at some data
25. ADS-B / TIS-B is chatty ~15 sec of traffic
29. What kind of data did Delta 176 send out?
30. Identification and category info
31. Air-to-air surveillance info
32. An All Call reply
33. Velocity, track, altitude changes
34. Position
35. Emergency status
36. Wait? Planes send text formatted data?
37. No, they send hex data https://www.lll.lu/~edward/edward/adsb/DecodingADSBposition.html
38. Raw stream Over a few seconds
39. You can read parts
40. These are paired position reports
41. mode-s.org
45. Acquiring ADS-B data • Data services/visualizations • ADS-B Exchange • FlightAware • Data • ADSBHub
46. Acquiring ADS-B data • Over the air, there are two flavors • 1090 MHz (Shared with Mode-S transponders) • 978 MHz (Universal Access Transceiver)
47. USB-based SDR E.g. FlightAware stick and PiAware
48. USB-based SDR E.g. FlightAware stick and PiAware
49. Data processing with ADS-B After acquiring data, what are some things we could do with it?
50. Visualization ideas • Traffic by time-of-day • General Aviation • Cargo • Schedule passenger service domestic and international
51. Common flight routes High and low Victor Airways and the flights that travel on them
52. Flights you see everyday • Near an airport with scheduled service? • What flights are consistent?
53. Unique aircraft over time Query airliners.net for photos
54. Altitude by aircraft type Scatter plot?
55. Flight path/terrain data
56. Hypothetical Data Pipeline • Acquire raw radio data • Ingestion into a Postgres time-series DB, with or without the radio metadata • Expand location data into PostGIS storage • Expand ICAO addresses into registration numbers, etc • Work with your language/framework of choice
57. Conclusions/Observations • There’s a lot of curiosity you can satisfy with ADSBExchange and FlightAware • “What’s that plane?” • You can go beyond those rich offerings with your own data collection
58. All of this helps my curiosity and wonder
59. Data Sources • ADSBHub • http://www.adsbhub.org • ADS-B Exchange • https://www.adsbexchange.com/data/ • FlightAware’s Firehose • https://flightaware.com/commercial/firehose/
60. Resources • FlightAware’s PiAware • https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build • ADS-B Exchange’s How to Feed • https://adsbexchange.com/how-to-feed/ • FAA info on ADS-B • https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/ • Mode-S.org • https://mode-s.org
61. Credits • ADSBExchange • FlightAware • Mode-S.org • Wikipedia • www.lll.lu/~edward • National Transportation Safety Board
62. VitalSource Check out our booth!
63. Thank You! https://wallscorp.us/presentations/ https://twitter.com/base10