Tracking Flights: How Flightradar24 Works

Posted by Team Maria on May 7th, 2019

Many people get nervous when they think about flying, so they will not get on a plane. "Call me as soon as you land," my mother tells me every time I travel. And if I do not, he gets angry. Doing it is not bad, but if you usually travel twice a week, this would become ridiculous.

For those worried parents, Flightradar24 turns out to be a great solution: it is a service that allows to know what happens in an aircraft.

Being frank, there are already several services that do flight tracking. However, most have updating problems. For United States airlines, the information is usually updated, something that does not happen for other countries and airports.

For those cases, the problem is in the source of the data. As a general rule, the tracking data is obtained from the airport's website. And I ask myself: who in this world would have such a service, if anyone interested could go to an airport and get the desired information?

For these cases, the main problem is the untimely state changes (a process that is sometimes completely manual), as well as the lack of transparency when wanting to know what the aircraft does at a specific time.

For example, the state of a flight could be "taken off" even though it is still on the ground, after the plane has been placed on the runway for 40 minutes.

The focus of Flightradar24 is different: it receives the flight data directly from the aircraft. It achieves this thanks to a technology of automatic surveillance of broadcasting, or ADS-B for its acronym in English, used by most modern aircraft.

In the beginning, this transmission technology was designed for dispatchers with the objective of locating aircraft with greater precision. Also for the pilots, so they could better know the traffic.

ADS-B is a relatively complex and sophisticated system that, for example, helps pilots obtain the greatest amount of data on weather and updates related to the terrain, among other aspects. However, the functionality that we are most interested in analyzing is the regularity with which they transmit the GPS location data, as well as the speed, the unique "address" of the aircraft and the flight number through the 1090 MHz channel.

The data transmitted by the aircraft also includes the so-called 'squawk', or response code, which could be used to pass over the coded information (which in cases of emergency, the value is set at 7700, and in those of a hijacking 7500). With which, any type of situation outside the limits is also traceable.

All these data, oddly enough, are sent through a decrypted channel and can be accessed by anyone: all you need to do is a bit of the skills of a radio enthusiast, an antenna that reaches 1090 MHz and build a simple radio receiver. Easy, right?

However, there is a simpler way to do this: find an average TV tuner with a USB interface on eBay, such as Al-IExpress or any other (around $ 10 or $ 20), install custom drivers instead of the usual ... and that's it! And if your PC is connected to the Internet, you could be part of a huge crowdsourcing project.