Who Knows Where Almost Every
Flight Is Right Now?
Sweden's Flightradar24 has thousands of receivers world-wide tracking planes
Flightradar24's chief executive Fredrik Lindahl, left, with Mikael Robertsson, a co-founder of the global plane tracking service, at the company's Stockholm headquarters.
It's 11 o'clock. Does your airline know where your flight is? Maybe not, but a couple of aviation geeks who crowdsourced a global tracking network do.
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014 left the traveling public dismayed that airlines don't constantly track airplanes. In that vacuum, Flightradar24, based here, has become the go-to source of information on tracking planes. The operation relies on volunteers world-wide with 7,500 receivers installed on roofs, towers, islands and ships.
Flightradar24's website is used by airlines, airports, Boeing and Airbus operations centers and news agencies. Airport workers use it to check on arriving flights. Car services use it to keep tabs on arriving customers. Want to follow your spouse's arrival time on a flight from Dubai, or figure out what just flew over your house? Flightradar24 can track it in real-time.
A Flightradar24 receiver surrounded by model airplanes. The flight-tracking firm has sent 7,500 of the small black boxes to volunteers around the world.
"Flightradar24 is to aviation kind of
like Facebook is to social media," said Mark Young, a medical evacuation pilot
in Montrose, Colo., who volunteers in Civil Air Patrol search-and-rescue
missions. He's put up Flightradar24 receivers in areas of Colorado, Arizona and
Utah where the Federal Aviation Administration doesn't have low-altitude radar
coverage. In exchange he gets data from Flightradar24 that helps locate missing
airplanes.
"We're using it to save lives," he says.
Flightradar24 showed how airlines were routinely flying over conflict at the Ukraine-Russia border when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down with 298 people aboard on July 17, 2014. And it collected data that first pointed investigators to conclude that a Germanwings pilot intentionally flew an Airbus A320 into the French Alps, killing all 150 people onboard on March 24.
Most planes manufactured in the last 10 years and many others retrofitted with new equipment transmit their location and a lot of other data through technology called ADS-B: Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. It is a crucial part of next-generation air-traffic control and will someday replace radar, which can be slightly inaccurate and slow, by plotting airplanes via the position they transmit. It is already being used by air-traffic controllers in some countries, including parts of the U.S. But widespread use is still many years and billions of dollars away.
Flightradar24 founders Mikael Robertsson, 39, and Olov Lindberg, 38, friends from an early 1990s computer-programming society, heard about ADS-B and realized they could buy a couple of small receivers, put antennas on the roofs of their houses-one south of Stockholm and one north of the city-and track planes flying over Stockholm. They added the airplane-tracking feed to their main business: an airline-ticket price-comparison search site, similar to Kayak, that they started in 2006.
The flight tracking brought visitors to their site. Soon fans were asking if they could install receivers in their homes and add data to the site, first in Gothenburg, Sweden, then in Norway, then Poland. An antenna goes on the roof of a house and is wired to the receiver inside, which connects to the Internet and feeds data to the website.
A typical Flightradar24 view of air traffic across the globe. Airplanes that are yellow are tracked real-time through the firm's network of receivers; airplanes that are orange are depicted with data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration with a five-minute delay.
"Suddenly we had data from 10 receivers and we started to draw planes on Google Maps," says Mr. Robertsson. "But we had no idea how to make money with it."
The duo bought 10 more receivers, which cost a few hundred dollars each, and installed them in far-flung areas such as Greenland to track planes across the north Atlantic and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Amateur radio buffs and plane-spotter hobbyists contacted the company about installing more receivers. A volunteer wrote software for them that would extract all kinds of data from the ADS-B signal.
In addition to a flight's call sign, position, altitude, airspeed and heading, ADS-B also broadcasts a plane's origin and destination. If requested by air-traffic controllers, ADS-B will even transmit data such as settings of cockpit instruments and how much fuel is left.
Air-traffic controllers directing planes toward London's hyper-busy Heathrow Airport already routinely use ADS-B to double check pilots. The data displayed on a controller's screen shows the altitude selected in the autopilot, so if a flight is told to descend to 5,000 feet, the controller can make sure the pilot didn't mistakenly dial in 4,000 feet.
In the U.S., the FAA issued a $1.8 billion ADS-B contract to Exelis Inc., a unit of communications-technology company Harris Corp. Exelis has installed 634 ground stations and receivers on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Air-traffic controllers are already using ADS-B over the Gulf, where there is no radar coverage. ADS-B also has been used at select airports to space airplanes precisely behind one another: Jets with the technology can talk to each other and adjust speed to maintain safe separation.
The FAA has required all planes, including private propeller planes, to be equipped with ADS-B transmitters by 2020. Once that happens, radar will eventually be phased out.
Flightradar24 doesn't aspire to be a fail-safe system used to direct airplanes like Exelis. To be used for air-traffic control operations, systems have to be secure, redundant and subjected to rigorous testing.
But Flightradar24, and other, smaller ADS-B trackers like FlightAware and Planefinder, have already proven to have broad coverage. In 2010, a volcanic ash cloud shut down travel in Europe and Flightradar24 became the source for news agencies and government leaders to assess the impact. On April 16, 2010, four million visitors hit the site and crashed servers. "That was the point we realized we could make something more out of this," Mr. Robertsson says.
They started to invest in receivers and software and developed an app for smartphones that sells for $3.99. With 1.5 million registered users, the income has bought equipment to expand coverage, which back in 2010 was still mostly Europe.
A Flightradar24 receiver, about the size of a smartphone, includes a memory card that saves five hours of data broadcast by airplanes overhead. Data from a receiver in the French Alps first tipped investigators that a Germanwings pilot intentionally crashed an Airbus A320.
By the summer of 2012, Messrs. Robertsson and Lindberg had 400 receivers up and running. They split their company in two and sold the airline-ticket-search site in January 2014, using the money to fund manufacturing of their own receivers. They also hired Fredrik Lindahl, 38, a longtime acquaintance with a background in online marketing, as chief executive of Flightradar24.
Soon they were sending out 50 receivers a week. They screened each volunteer for location, preferring spots above obstructions and making sure they had multiple receivers in key areas in case some go offline. Each receiver has a range of about 200 nautical miles and costs $500 to $600 including shipping.
Chris Servheen, a wildlife biologist who lives on a hill above Missoula, Mont., volunteered to host a receiver because he and his teenage sons were "interested in being part of a network and contributing to information," he says.
Now Mr. Servheen says they can identify planes flying overhead-Seattle traffic, cargo flights from Asia and European flights into and out of San Francisco and Los Angeles. "It's like bird watching," he says.
Lance Ginner, who pioneered satellite use for amateur radio in the 1960s, added Flightradar24 receivers to mountaintop radio antenna sites he maintains in California. "It's just incredible in this day and age that you don't know where an airplane is all the time," says Mr. Ginner, who lives near San Francisco. "The capability is there in the plane. It's not rocket science."
When Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed, French investigators immediately called Flightradar24. The company's receivers have a memory card that stores five hours of data. Flightradar24 was able to download the memory card from a receiver 50 miles from the crash site. It took 48 hours to analyze. "We found we had the autopilot data saved. The pilot changed from cruising altitude down to 100 feet," indicating he intentionally flew the jet into the Alps, said Mr. Robertsson. Later when the plane's black box data recorder was found, the Flightradar24 conclusion was confirmed.
Several systems are competing to become the global standard for official flight tracking, including Aireon LLC-an effort led by satellite firm Iridium, Canada's air-traffic control provider NAV Canada and others. The FAA and Exelis also are part of Aireon, which says it expects to be in service in 2018.
Airlines and air-traffic-control agencies say receivers mounted on satellites are necessary to continuously track planes over large bodies of water. In addition to tracking, constant surveillance can save time and fuel by giving planes more direct routing and quicker altitude changes.
Flightradar24 thinks it can cobble together ocean coverage with receivers on islands, ships, buoys and maybe even balloons to improve its flight-tracking services for consumers. There are already Flightradar24 receivers on islands between Alaska and Russia. There are also receivers on islands north of Brazil, on Madeira and the Azores islands in the Atlantic and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, as well as on a boat near Halifax, Nova Scotia. "Our main goal is to have global coverage," Mr. Robertsson says.
Corrections & Amplifications
In an earlier version of this article, a photo of a conference room at Flightradar24's Stockholm headquarters showed an image of an airplane seen through a window. That airplane was determined to have been digitally inserted into the image.
"We're using it to save lives," he says.
Flightradar24 showed how airlines were routinely flying over conflict at the Ukraine-Russia border when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down with 298 people aboard on July 17, 2014. And it collected data that first pointed investigators to conclude that a Germanwings pilot intentionally flew an Airbus A320 into the French Alps, killing all 150 people onboard on March 24.
Most planes manufactured in the last 10 years and many others retrofitted with new equipment transmit their location and a lot of other data through technology called ADS-B: Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. It is a crucial part of next-generation air-traffic control and will someday replace radar, which can be slightly inaccurate and slow, by plotting airplanes via the position they transmit. It is already being used by air-traffic controllers in some countries, including parts of the U.S. But widespread use is still many years and billions of dollars away.
Flightradar24 founders Mikael Robertsson, 39, and Olov Lindberg, 38, friends from an early 1990s computer-programming society, heard about ADS-B and realized they could buy a couple of small receivers, put antennas on the roofs of their houses-one south of Stockholm and one north of the city-and track planes flying over Stockholm. They added the airplane-tracking feed to their main business: an airline-ticket price-comparison search site, similar to Kayak, that they started in 2006.
The flight tracking brought visitors to their site. Soon fans were asking if they could install receivers in their homes and add data to the site, first in Gothenburg, Sweden, then in Norway, then Poland. An antenna goes on the roof of a house and is wired to the receiver inside, which connects to the Internet and feeds data to the website.
A typical Flightradar24 view of air traffic across the globe. Airplanes that are yellow are tracked real-time through the firm's network of receivers; airplanes that are orange are depicted with data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration with a five-minute delay.
"Suddenly we had data from 10 receivers and we started to draw planes on Google Maps," says Mr. Robertsson. "But we had no idea how to make money with it."
The duo bought 10 more receivers, which cost a few hundred dollars each, and installed them in far-flung areas such as Greenland to track planes across the north Atlantic and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Amateur radio buffs and plane-spotter hobbyists contacted the company about installing more receivers. A volunteer wrote software for them that would extract all kinds of data from the ADS-B signal.
In addition to a flight's call sign, position, altitude, airspeed and heading, ADS-B also broadcasts a plane's origin and destination. If requested by air-traffic controllers, ADS-B will even transmit data such as settings of cockpit instruments and how much fuel is left.
Air-traffic controllers directing planes toward London's hyper-busy Heathrow Airport already routinely use ADS-B to double check pilots. The data displayed on a controller's screen shows the altitude selected in the autopilot, so if a flight is told to descend to 5,000 feet, the controller can make sure the pilot didn't mistakenly dial in 4,000 feet.
In the U.S., the FAA issued a $1.8 billion ADS-B contract to Exelis Inc., a unit of communications-technology company Harris Corp. Exelis has installed 634 ground stations and receivers on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Air-traffic controllers are already using ADS-B over the Gulf, where there is no radar coverage. ADS-B also has been used at select airports to space airplanes precisely behind one another: Jets with the technology can talk to each other and adjust speed to maintain safe separation.
The FAA has required all planes, including private propeller planes, to be equipped with ADS-B transmitters by 2020. Once that happens, radar will eventually be phased out.
Flightradar24 doesn't aspire to be a fail-safe system used to direct airplanes like Exelis. To be used for air-traffic control operations, systems have to be secure, redundant and subjected to rigorous testing.
But Flightradar24, and other, smaller ADS-B trackers like FlightAware and Planefinder, have already proven to have broad coverage. In 2010, a volcanic ash cloud shut down travel in Europe and Flightradar24 became the source for news agencies and government leaders to assess the impact. On April 16, 2010, four million visitors hit the site and crashed servers. "That was the point we realized we could make something more out of this," Mr. Robertsson says.
They started to invest in receivers and software and developed an app for smartphones that sells for $3.99. With 1.5 million registered users, the income has bought equipment to expand coverage, which back in 2010 was still mostly Europe.
A Flightradar24 receiver, about the size of a smartphone, includes a memory card that saves five hours of data broadcast by airplanes overhead. Data from a receiver in the French Alps first tipped investigators that a Germanwings pilot intentionally crashed an Airbus A320.
By the summer of 2012, Messrs. Robertsson and Lindberg had 400 receivers up and running. They split their company in two and sold the airline-ticket-search site in January 2014, using the money to fund manufacturing of their own receivers. They also hired Fredrik Lindahl, 38, a longtime acquaintance with a background in online marketing, as chief executive of Flightradar24.
Soon they were sending out 50 receivers a week. They screened each volunteer for location, preferring spots above obstructions and making sure they had multiple receivers in key areas in case some go offline. Each receiver has a range of about 200 nautical miles and costs $500 to $600 including shipping.
Chris Servheen, a wildlife biologist who lives on a hill above Missoula, Mont., volunteered to host a receiver because he and his teenage sons were "interested in being part of a network and contributing to information," he says.
Now Mr. Servheen says they can identify planes flying overhead-Seattle traffic, cargo flights from Asia and European flights into and out of San Francisco and Los Angeles. "It's like bird watching," he says.
Lance Ginner, who pioneered satellite use for amateur radio in the 1960s, added Flightradar24 receivers to mountaintop radio antenna sites he maintains in California. "It's just incredible in this day and age that you don't know where an airplane is all the time," says Mr. Ginner, who lives near San Francisco. "The capability is there in the plane. It's not rocket science."
When Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed, French investigators immediately called Flightradar24. The company's receivers have a memory card that stores five hours of data. Flightradar24 was able to download the memory card from a receiver 50 miles from the crash site. It took 48 hours to analyze. "We found we had the autopilot data saved. The pilot changed from cruising altitude down to 100 feet," indicating he intentionally flew the jet into the Alps, said Mr. Robertsson. Later when the plane's black box data recorder was found, the Flightradar24 conclusion was confirmed.
Several systems are competing to become the global standard for official flight tracking, including Aireon LLC-an effort led by satellite firm Iridium, Canada's air-traffic control provider NAV Canada and others. The FAA and Exelis also are part of Aireon, which says it expects to be in service in 2018.
Airlines and air-traffic-control agencies say receivers mounted on satellites are necessary to continuously track planes over large bodies of water. In addition to tracking, constant surveillance can save time and fuel by giving planes more direct routing and quicker altitude changes.
Flightradar24 thinks it can cobble together ocean coverage with receivers on islands, ships, buoys and maybe even balloons to improve its flight-tracking services for consumers. There are already Flightradar24 receivers on islands between Alaska and Russia. There are also receivers on islands north of Brazil, on Madeira and the Azores islands in the Atlantic and Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, as well as on a boat near Halifax, Nova Scotia. "Our main goal is to have global coverage," Mr. Robertsson says.
Corrections & Amplifications
In an earlier version of this article, a photo of a conference room at Flightradar24's Stockholm headquarters showed an image of an airplane seen through a window. That airplane was determined to have been digitally inserted into the image.
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