Show HN: ADS-B visualizer

Impressive. Though, for one of the examples, set in an area with active military conflict, I wondered whether the information is new and useful to anyone involved.

If you look at https://globe.adsbexchange.com, and filter for military/interesting (the U button at the top of the screen), you'll see that at any given time there are a LOT of military flights over the US. Most are transport, refueling tankers and what seem to be pilots-in-training (mostly in Texas and Florida, some in Colorado), but there are plenty of helicopters and smaller Lear-type jets. When the president or vice president is flying somewhere there are typically one or more E-3 AWACS planes in the air to provide radar coverage.

There are certainly military planes that fly without ADSB, but for flights where secrecy doesn't matter, they seem to fly with it on. I've seen all manner of planes with ADSB, from U2 spy planes, F-15, F-16, A-10, the occasional B-52, and more.

Fighters often don't have ADS-B, but there are lots of other military aircraft that routinely use it (transports, etc.). Go to https://globe.adsbexchange.com and press U to show only military.

The ADS-B Out situation with gliders in the USA is complex. Many high-performance modern gliders used for racing and cross country flying are equipped with Mode-S transponders with 1090ES Out (either 14 CFR 91.227 ADS-B Out compliant or TABS/TSO-C199 ADS-B Out compliant) as well as the glider specific FLARM traffic awareness system that broadcasts and receives proprietary low-power position data. FLARM systems, at least as used in the USA also typically receive 1090ES In so they drive the integrated traffic display and warning systems in these modern glider cockpits. For historical and technical reasons gliders use a FLARM modified NMEA serial data protocols for traffic data in the cockpit instead of what is found in GA aircraft ADS-B traffic display systems.

Gliders potentially face very different risk scenarios and their owners will hopefully equip for what is the most significant risks to them and others. e.g. gliders often fly close to each other, especially when thermalling together, if flying with other gliders in remote areas then the FLARM system optimized to handle glider on glider threats is optimal (where GA focused ADS-B produces far to many false alerts), if flying near lots of GA aircraft ADS-B Out (and In via FLARM) is likely optimal, if flying near airliners, fast jets and tactical military aircraft then transponders alone even without 1090ES Out may be most critical item for their SSR, TCAS and IFF compatibility. Ideally owners do equip with all three... Mode-S, 1090ES Out, and FLARM.

The challenge may be more where there are low-cost/low-value gliders, maybe trainers and glider club owned gliders especially those located in busy traffic areas. You would hope those owners long ago got the message they should be equipping with some forms of supplementary traffic broadcast/awareness systems.

UAT adoption in gliders is nearly non-existent as FLARM systems only receive directly on 1090ES In and you don't want to rely on ADS-R coverage in remote or mountainous areas.

TABS/TSO-C199 is an easier route to an approved installation of ADS-B Out systems in type-certified gliders. TSO-C199 was developed by industry and the FAA following the 2006 mid-air collision between a glider and Hawker business jet near Minden NV. Experimental category gliders will typically have 14 CFR 91.227 compliant installations done under the same "meets performance requirements" clauses as many experimental power aircraft.

I started playing around with ADS-B and military aircraft are all over the place, at least on the east coast of the USA.

In fact, this Seahawk just flew over: https://globe.airplanes.live/?icao=ae6904

For general transport/rebasing, it seems like it would just make life easier on air traffic controllers, and probably also other traffic in the air (I think TCAS uses ADS-B?). By way of analogy, the military might have permission to drive around at night with their lights off, but it'd make me more comfortable if they did that only when it was operationally useful (i.e. I assume B-2s taking off from Missouri to go bombing have transponders off the whole way.)

"ADSB" data isn't always ADSB, either. The big ADS-B mapping sites (adsbexchange.com, and the ones that popped up after its acquisition) also collect MLAT data from their volunteer stations to triangulate aircraft with ADS-B disabled but can otherwise be detected, if not located directly (via Mode S, mostly, I think).

Those Reaper drones show up on FlightRadar24 and ADSBExchange while patrolling over the Black Sea monitoring Crimea and beyond.

There's plenty of H60s and H47s out of Lewis McChord on ADSB, not to mention P8's, C17's, etc...if you're on flight following you'll get advisories or even just watching "the fish finder" you'll see them.

Sometimes they forget to turn it off:

https://theaviationist.com/2023/11/22/usaf-ac-130j-iraq/

We bought clickhouse.com from the previous owner 2.5 years ago, who used it for some ad network - it was in some block lists, but I hope we managed to clean up most of them.

Firefox, no map either. Tried all combinations of adblocker & VPN on/off, refreshing the map. Saw couple of tiles for a brief moment, then they disappeared, and I never saw them again.

It seems to be all working on my end though.

fully empty map on iOS safari for me.

The readme contains a lot of the implementation details: "We use three different tables with different levels of detail: planes_mercator contains 100% of the data, planes_mercator_sample10 contains 10% of the data, and planes_mercator_sample100 contains 1% of the data. The loading starts with a 1% sample to provide instant response even while rendering the whole world. After loading the first level of detail, it continues to the next level of 10%, and then it continues with 100% of the data. This gives a nice effect of progressive loading."

There are two data sources: adsb.lol and adsbexchange. The first is updated each day from https://github.com/adsblol/globe_history_2024. The second should be updated each month (they provide only sample data for the first day of each month), but I still have to put it in cron.

The update scripts are also open-source, published here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/adsb.exposed/blob/main/prepare...

You can find the attribution and the link to the details at the bottom right corner of the main page. It links to the documentation: https://github.com/ClickHouse/adsb.exposed, which provides the full details. Additionally, you can read the license here: https://github.com/adsblol/globe_history_2023/blob/main/LICE...

This is some copyleft troll-level pedantry [0]. They clearly made a good effort to comply with the license. Additionally, ADSB.lol requires contributors to license their contributions under CC0. Databases that don't have some sort of creative work involved in their compilation aren't copyrightable, so it's very dubious that anyone could enforce any sort of restrictive license over ADSB.lol's database as a whole when its individual contributions are CC0.

[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-c...

I keep the dashboard open :) So far ok with ~2000 QPS.

Much like we're lucky to have eyes that happen to see the sun's strongest frequencies?

There are satellite ADS-B receivers and some of that data makes its way to public aggregators. https://www.icao.int/SAM/Documents/2014-SAMIG13/02%20NavCana...

Yes, it is possible to connect to the database directly and run an arbitrary query. Example:

    $ clickhouse-client --user website --host kvzqttvc2n.eu-west-1.aws.clickhouse-staging.com

    clickhouse-cloud :) SELECT t, desc, count() AS c FROM planes_mercator_sample100 GROUP BY ALL ORDER BY c DESC LIMIT 10

        ┌─t────┬─desc────────────────────────────┬────────c─┐
     1. │ B738 │ BOEING 737-800                  │ 51530781 │
     2. │ A320 │ AIRBUS A-320                    │ 37196762 │
     3. │ C172 │ CESSNA 172 Skyhawk              │ 20049393 │
     4. │ A321 │ AIRBUS A-321                    │ 19983151 │
     5. │ A20N │ AIRBUS A-320neo                 │ 14938832 │
     6. │ B38M │ BOEING 737 MAX 8                │ 14200826 │
     7. │ B737 │ BOEING 737-700                  │ 13929403 │
     8. │ A319 │ AIRBUS A-319                    │ 13906164 │
     9. │ E75L │ EMBRAER ERJ-170-200 (long wing) │ 12006441 │
    10. │ A21N │ AIRBUS A-321neo                 │ 10965047 │
        └──────┴─────────────────────────────────┴──────────┘

Add FORMAT CSV to output in CSV (or any other format).

To obtain an SQL query for a particular region, you can open the browser dev tools (F12), switch to Network, and copy a particular request that is made when you select an area with the rectangle selection tool.

I think what you see is CIVIL AIR PATROL and CIVIL AIR PATROL INC

Types: GLID (SGS 2-33A)

Flights: N7589, N2037T

Registration: N7589, N2037T

When you select the dottet square button in the lower left and select a rectangle the planes within this rectangle are listed

Very interesting project!