This might be interesting for some.
As a lot of pilots here fly IFR, they will be used to the flight tracking offered by various fight plan filing services via EuroControl, including AutoRouter, RocketRoute & EuroFPL.
However for those of us flying VFR, flight tracking isn’t so easily available. But it can be very useful if arranging to meet someone. They don’t have to go to the airport and wait. With flight tracking, they can see where you are and time their own arrival to coincide. Or sometimes I’ve had a passenger with a nervous spouse back home. It might be nice for them to be able to keep up to date on the flight (without having to get text messages after landing to reassure them).
In the latest version of EasyVFR we introduced a flight tracking feature. I did some early proof of concept testing, but I never really got to try out the feature during formal beta testing, due to a grounded aircraft. That was left to others.
But on the recent trip to Scotland with Peter, I got to try it out.
The system uses a mobile phone or cellular tablet to transmit the aircraft position, and a website for those who wish to monitor it. A lot of effort has gone into optimising the data transmitted so that it works as best as possible even with just a very weak data signal. Even still I wasn’t expecting too much from this trip. We were in very remote places, and I was using a Three network sim, and Three very poor ground signal in the areas that we were flying. In fact they have no signal for much of it on the ground.
So I was very surprised to see the results!
The Scottish end of the trip
Irish end of the trip
You can see the full data that was tracked in Google Earth here.
You can see that the recording only started a bit north of Belfast, northbound. (I’d forgotten to turn mobile data on!). As to be expected, it loses connection when over open water, but surprisingly it does seem to manage to keep it for quite a while over water. I’d set it to send a location once every second, which in hindsight was overkill. Once every 30 or 60 seconds would have been plenty…..especially if using roaming data.
I’m looking forward to using this a bit more. Just thought I’d share it in case it’s of interest to others. It’s an interesting data point in the debates that have been had here over the past year about the usefulness of mobile connections while airborne. I think if the software developers put some effort into optimising the data for weak signals, then some useful things can be achieved.
Colm
Did you work together with the SkyLines-Team? They already have an open flight tracking platform : https://skylines.aero/tracking/info
Hi Mh,
No I’ve never heard of them. Thanks for the link!
I’d seen the usefulness of the IFR flight trackers, and had grown to like an app called Glympse which allows me to share my location while driving or walking. Glympse is brilliant when meeting someone and trying to co-ordinate or simply letting them know what time I’ll get there. I wanted something similar for flying.
I tried to convince the PocketFMS team to put such a feature into EasyVFR, but they weren’t sure how much data would get through and therefore how well it would work. So I wrote a small proof of concept program and tried it out and all worked really well, so the idea way brought forward. It’s been ready for awhile now, and the beta crew have been testing it for a few months, but only released in the public version in the latest version last month.
Colm
Max Kellermann is your goto-guy. He recently developed the XCSoar-Cloud, in which thermals are stored for live display. He said this utilized a skylines-data protocol which he has developed to work with very low network coverage. I am not very knowledgable with these issues, but he has done much work already and since it being open source, there might be a good starting point for applications in other parts of general aviation.
His Homepage: http://max.kellermann.name/
XCSoar-Cloud: http://cloud.xcsoar.net/
Here is another option: http://www.aeroplusaviation.com/aircraft-tracking
