- Imagine in the old days, come out to spotting
and you wouldn't know what's coming in and out.
You'd really need a binocular just to look around.
Time has changed.
(Solari board flapping)
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That is a jackpot of plane spotting.
I'm standing in the COVID doing this
because I love doing this.
(upbeat music)
(plane engine roaring)
- Hey Sam, did you get a good shot?
- [Sam] Uh, not bad, not bad.
You were tracking the flight, right?
Where did that flight go to?
- To Newark.
- [Sam] Newark, ah, it's a bit windy right now.
What's the wind doing, do you know?
- Let me check on RadarBox.
- [Sam] Do they have a HS on the RadarBox?
- Yes, let me check, 330, 15 knots.
- [Sam] Ah, no wonder I can hear the wind.
- I've been tracking flights for years.
I know a few things that can help you spotting.
Come with me.
Sam, what you think this is?
- [Sam] This has to be that RadarBox, right?
This is a box.
- Correct, this is a RadarBox receiver.
All you need is an antenna, a connection to the antenna,
a power supply and a connection to the internet.
And it processes flight data
and sends the data to our servers.
- But can you walk through the whole process,
cause I still don't understand.
- Yes, I'll explain that to you, Sam.
So we have an aircraft and the aircraft needs
to have a Mode S transponder.
So the transponder is an equipment in the aircraft
that sends real-time data.
Then that data is received by one of our antennas,
and the antenna sends data to the receiver.
The receiver processes the data, works the data,
and sends relevant data to our servers.
Simultaneously our servers get data from 24,000 boxes,
that's the number of RadarBoxes that we have nowadays.
They process the data and get the data ready
for the final customer.
- Why will people share data with you through this box,
they have to connect to internet and power,
why will people bother with sharing data?
- Aviation is driven by passion.
And the feeling of someone in a remote place,
in a remote location of this planet,
of sharing data with us and being part
of one of the biggest aviation communities worldwide.
- Hi there, my name is Leander
and I live on the east coast of Canada
in Newfoundland and Labrador.
We are a hundred miles inland
from the Atlantic Ocean next to CYYR.
I really enjoy this
because I can track 10 to 15 planes an hour
within a 400 kilometre radius of my house.
(upbeat music)
- Sam, do you know what's this?
- [Sam] It looks like a map with handwritten stuff on it.
Wait, is that like you manually track this,
you handwritten on it?
- Correct, at the time there was no internet,
no flight tracking software.
And I had ever written here all the planes
over the Atlantic Ocean.
By hands I wrote the location of the plane,
so this is manual flight tracking.
- [Sam] Wow, I can't believe somebody did that-
- Yeah. - without computer,
without internet.
- So this is how it started,
I was a, I have a passion for aviation
and I went to the airport many times
to spot this beautiful GWS 747.
In 1987, I got my first handheld radio
and I could listen to communications
between air traffic controllers and pilots with this radio.
Actually I follow you on Instagram and I,
we track your flight from, your solo flight,
from Torrance to San Bernardino.
The aircraft is ADS-B equipped and you flew at 7,500 feet.
Actually, we also tracked your flight back to Torrance.
- Oh wow, that's incredible,
you can even track my flight.
It's showing the VFR chart, like all the airspace here,
colourful huh?
Do you guys know what's the world's biggest aircraft?
And I'll give you a hint, it is not the Antonov 225,
there's something even bigger,
and I want to see how you track this aeroplane.
- Yeah, it's a Stratolaunch.
Just like you, Sam, I also love aviation
and it seems that this plane, six engine plane,
did lots of flight testing on April 29th
in the Mojave at 10,000 feet.
(photos swooshing)
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- What I'm interested is right now,
I want to know how many planes are flying
in the sky every day.
You know, because the numbers must be down the last,
since COVID, are we on that recovery path?
- Looking at RadarBox statistics,
it seems that we are finally having good aviation use.
Nowadays we see an average
of 70,000 commercial flights worldwide.
That's a much higher number than the 22,000
that we saw last year,
but a little bit shy away of the 100,000
that we see on the pre-COVID year.
On the left, you can see traffic for 2020,
on the right 2021.
And it looks like that the US is leading the way,
followed by Europe on aviation recovery.
And we can see here Asia, the Middle East, Australia,
and it seems that every region is slowly recovering,
having more flights than last year.
(upbeat music)
- [Sam] Is there a way on the AirNav RadarBox here
to just show only cargo flights,
'cause I knew there's a lot of cargo out of 70,000.
- [Andre] Yes of course, Sam,
you just go to our websites,
on the filter settings you de-select airliner
and you select cargo.
- So Sam, I'm going to show you one of the typical messages
that we receive out of the 2.5 billion
that we receive daily.
Okay so here's a typical message that we receive.
So for example, you have the aircraft,
you have the aircraft type, you have the Mode S hex codes,
you have the call sign, the flight number.
Here, you have the position latitude and longitude,
and the altitude also,
the heading, the ground speed, the squawk code.
- [Sam] You don't obviously look at all these 2.5 billion
by manually, right?
- Yeah actually, sometimes we do have to look
at those messages manually,
because sometimes the errors are caused
by decoding errors and like signal errors.
Even the Mode S hex codes can come wrong,
which would make the aircraft being mistaken
by different aircraft.
- 'Cause I've seen on flight tracking app,
the common error is the aircraft registration
belongs to an A380, and they said this is a Cirrus 22.
It's really weird.
- Yeah, we have to fix it on the backend
so that when we process the data we can detect those errors,
do some validation on our side
and be able to eliminate those.
- The RadarBox is created by aviators for aviators.
And we have some unique features,
which we find them to be very interesting.
For example, this is a newly delivered Emirates A380
which these, the fully vaccinated flights,
this premium economy.
We have this unique feature aircraft utilisation,
which clearly shows that this aircraft
has made 227 flights since delivery,
and is flying an average of 13.2 hours per day.
- [Sam] That's pretty high.
I think Emirates is pleased with this aeroplane.
- So our airport page,
in this case we are showing London Heathrow.
We can see that in Heathrow they are now
with a single runway operation,
and they are using 09R for bus take off and landing.
This is the airport heat map
where we can see the most flown destination
from London Heathrow.
We can see that New York Kennedy's on top,
followed by Doha in Qatar.
Another unique feature that we have
is real-time airband radio.
In this case we are listening to Anchorage 118.3 frequency,
tower frequency.
So we can track the planes and listen to them in real time.
- [Sam] So who'd use your data here?
- Our data is used
by all types of aviation related customers.
From aviation enthusiasts to airports, airlines,
business jets operators.
For example, we have Cancun airports
that compiles takeoff and landing data
using our data sources.
And we even have NASDAQ,
they predict stock prices using flight tracking data.
- Ah, so I've seen now on the screen like this one,
I chose EVA Air triple seven,
and this one is tracked by satellite, right?
There's a little satellite symbol here.
- So when we have 13 different data sources,
and at any time we select
which is the best data source to track a flight,
in case of this EVA Air triple seven
from Taipei to Los Angeles,
it's being tracked by satellite
because it's the most relevant data source.
- [Sam] But what's your preference of the tracking?
- Ground-based ADS-B data is by far the most reliable
and with faster update speed.
So if we have ground-based ADS-B,
we always prefer to use ground-based ADS-B.
- Andre, that was great.
I've seen a lot today and playing with the RadarBox filter
and see all the flights around the world.
I can do this for hours at home,
but what sort of feature you guys would like to see
that is currently not developed or available
on a flight tracking app?
I would like to hear from you,
leave it in the comments section.
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