[kevinelliott]

Hey, I'm Kevin (founder of Airframes), and I'd like to give some background here.

While the world has been obsessing about ADS-B, which is primarily focused on positional data, I've been building a platform that is heavily focused on ACARS (often referred to as Plain Old ACARS), VDL (the successor to ACARS), HFDL (HF-based, also containing ACARS payloads), and SATCOM (such as AoA - ACARS over Insmarsat, and AoI - ACARS over Iridium).

The information in ACARS is quite interesting, and reveals significantly more about flights than ADS-B alone. The goal of the project has always been to provide a fuller picture of what is flying, including OOOI, routing, equipment status, fuel details, and more.

Some very early feeders and enthusiasts have been feeding data and supporting the effort, and as many/most HN folks know, this is all very time consuming.

Let me respond to your points too:

1. I'm a strong supporter of open source, and conceptually even open data. Your assessment that most of the stuff is still private is true. This is a strategic decision I have made. Having watched the aggregator space for many years now, my concern was that since we're still getting things built out (and I'm the only developer), a heavily budgeted competitor (such as FlightAware) could come along and enter the ACARS space long before we were ready and make the effort pointless.

I do plan to continue to open source and open data, and as it makes sense to, at my own expense, I will do so. Especially as more people become involved and build interest in ACARS.

2. The roadmap on the trello has not been updated, because, there were very few people interested in the effort and did not really engage in using it. But there is most definitely a roadmap -- some of the things are related to API, desktop/mobile app, a radio-focused OS (initially aimed at making it easy to feed to Airframes and other aggregators, but with the goal of wider radio interests) similar to OctoPi for OctoPrint.

3. Documentation has been in the works. But, seeing as that I have a lot of priorities (and it's mostly just me at the moment), it's not complete. I was hoping to release it when more digestible/ready. https://docs.airframes.io

4. I would hope that folks do consider supporting the effort, and there are a lot of big plans for it in the ACARS space.

Also, to put it bluntly, we were not yet ready for the events that unfolded. So there are some growing pains to deal with there.