[route3]

Pretty cool. For those wondering the source of the data, it is likely ASDE-X/ASSC streaming in from the FAA's STDDS SWIM feed[0]. The terminal and ground data is especially cool and not as common as the usual flight tracking you see of en-route aircraft.

I'm using the STDDS feed to build a rough "go-around detector" in AWS for approaching aircraft by monitoring each approaching aircraft glide slope and dispatching a SNS notification "if currAlt > prevAlt".

If anyone has any questions about this stuff feel free to reach out, my email is in my profile. The easy part (IMHO) is slurping in the data which only requires a couple small EC2's and RDS, ~$125/mo. The hard part is often the presentation and making demos like these fun and shareable.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/swim/stdds/

[rconti]

Typically FlightAware shows planes on the ground as well. Can you elaborate on what the difference here is?

[route3]

I don't think I've seen FlightAware showing aircraft tracks on the ground.

They do show taxi times for arriving/departing aircraft and I wonder if they are stitching that data together using the STDDS feed.

To give you an example, for an arriving aircraft you would get an alert of "wheels down", which is as literal as it sounds: a timestamped event when the aircraft made contact with the ground. In addition to ground position events (allowing the tracking you see here), you would also receive an alert when the aircraft left the tracked movement surface, i.e. transitioned to the gate/ramp area and no longer on an active airport surface.

(Pretty sure I have that correct, it's been awhile since I got back to my STDDS-powered projects. If anybody familiar with STDDS wants to chime in, please do!)

For the curious, all these "alerts" are JMS messages with XML payloads. Pretty much non-stop stream of data, incredibly fun if you're a developer+av geek. For FlightAware-style tracking without using any ADS-B you'll want to subscribe to the SFDPS feed. You'll get position updates every 60 sec for all airborne flights in the US, which last week amounted to ~40GB in my Postgres DB. You can request higher resolution reporting which is every 12s.

[AdamJacobMuller]

Is your go-around detector data public anywhere?

[nivertech]

Are there any OSS packages to ingest this feed?

[route3]

Good question. I haven't stumbled upon any, but it's possible they are out there.

The FAA offers a sample client. Depending on your level of skill, the hardest part might be the onboarding with the FAA which includes establishing a site-to-site VPN between your network and theirs. Once that is setup and some other networking is configured, you can use their Java demo client with the credentials they provide to get the hang of it.

The source of data is an event queue, powered by Solace, using Java's JMS standard. You can write a little bit of a Java to parse the incoming messages to get to the XML payload. Honestly I found that part to be the easiest and the Linux networking parts (as part of the VPN) to be the most difficult.

I wrote up a bit of a guide here, it's a little rough and high-level but I hope it helps clarify things a bit if you feel like working with these feeds/data.

http://www.route3software.com/faa-swim-getting-started-guide...