Tracking The Global Whereabouts Of Aircraft That Are Not ADS-B Or Datalink Equipped Just Got Easier

FlightAware has announced a major innovation in global flight tracking with its launch of multilateration (MLAT) tracking of aircraft without ADS-B.

Leveraging FlightAware’s network of over 4,000 receivers in more than 110 countries, FlightAware now offers live flight tracking positions for non-ADS-B equipped aircraft by using multilateration (MLAT) of Mode S transponder signals. When a non-ADS-B aircraft is within line of sight of three or more FlightAware receivers, time difference of arrival (TDOA) MLAT is used to triangulate the position of the aircraft, providing real-time flight positions even where radar data is not available to FlightAware.

Although many new aircraft are delivered with ADS-B and can be tracked with only one FlightAware receiver, many business aircraft operating globally do not emit ADS-B positions. These aircraft can now leverage FlightAware’s MLAT network for real-time positions.

MLAT is currently available with about 2,000 existing receivers in the FlightAware network throughout Western Europe, over 40 states in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Eastern Australia, and New Zealand. Additional coverage will be added in December 2015. MLAT will be made available within all FlightAware products.

FlightAware also announced the availability of FlightAware Firehose, a new cloud-based, real-time and worldwide flight tracking data feed for application developers and professional users.

Service providers and application developers can now connect to FlightAware’s flight tracking data feed and receive over 500 real-time position reports per second and flight status messages for any airplane around the world, enabling any company to integrate FlightAware’s dataset into existing services or develop new, innovative products.

Firehose is a JSON or CSV-formatted feed that includes aircraft positions (latitude/longitude) with timestamp, altitude (flight level), groundspeed, heading, aircraft identification, registration, Mode-S code, squawk code, and FlightAware Flight ID. FlightAware Firehose also incorporates worldwide flight status data such as scheduled, estimated, and actual departure and arrival times, as well as flight plan routes and amendments, in addition to much more.

FlightAware makes it easy for users to connect to Firehose with in-depth service documentation that includes data types, sources, and formats. Software code examples are available in a variety of scripting languages.

(Image from FlightAware)

FMI: www.flightaware.com