In early 2020, Christine Dibble had
recently retired from the
US federal government and was eager to travel more,
but the coronavirus outbreak put those plans on hold.
اضافة اعلان
Grounded at home in Washington Grove, Maryland,
Dibble started to play around with a flight tracking app, and it opened the
skies for her.
Flightradar24 is one of several sites that compile
public information about aircraft locations, flight paths, ownership records,
altitude, and more for display in an interactive map. People can see details
about planes and where they’re heading almost anywhere in the world, including
Antarctica.
Dibble, a former technology worker for the
Environmental Protection Agency, had little knowledge about aviation, but the
app satisfied her wanderlust and sparked curiosity about what was happening
around her.
“The surprising thing about Flightradar to me is
that it triggers my imagination,” Dibble told me. “What are people up there on
that plane doing? Are they on vacation? On business?”
Peering at aircraft icons in the app, Dibble feels
excited for tourists she imagines on the flight departing a nearby airport for
Lisbon, Portugal. She empathizes with parents when she sees the virtual image
of an emergency helicopter on its way to a local children’s hospital.
“There are all these stories here,” she said.
Not long ago, the app showed that a small plane
flying low near her home had taken off close to a CIA training base. Dibble,
her husband, and her daughter dreamed up scenarios of a Russian oligarch being
whisked away in handcuffs.
Flight tracking sites are another example of a
technology that makes obscure information accessible and relevant for us mere
mortals and helps connect us to others. It’s pretty amazing that we can
Google whatever we’re curious about or video chat with friends far away. Following
flights on the other side of the world is another marvel.
Flightradar24 started in the 2000s to market a
Swedish ticket booking website, said its director of communications, Ian
Petchenik. Harnessing a technology called Automatic Dependent
Surveillance-Broadcast, the company’s founders and employees started installing
ADS-B receivers on rooftops in Sweden to pick up radio signals of planes
transmitting their locations to other aircraft and air traffic controllers.
The interactive map of air traffic proved more
popular than the booking service. The flight tracking service was born,
Petchenik said.
Now there are about 34,000 Flightradar24 receivers
that people worldwide have agreed to put on their homes and commercial
buildings and in other spots. Flightradar24 combines those signals with other
information, including a database of aircraft owners and commercial airplane
flight schedules, to assemble the data in a digital map.
You might be wondering: Is this a safety risk?
Representatives for the Federal Aviation Administration said that the agency
limited the available data on aircraft associated with the Defense Department,
Department of Homeland Security, and the Justice Department. Air Force One does
not appear in Flightradar24, for example. Owners of civilian planes can request
limits on their travel data disclosures, too.
Petchenik believes it’s important for real-time
information about activity in shared airspace to stay public.
Flightradar24 said that usage of the tracking
service spiked as the pandemic kept many would-be travelers like Dibble at
home. And last week, some people couldn’t access Flightradar24 because so many
users were following
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s circuitous flight path to
Taiwan, taken to navigate around potential conflicts with Chinese military
planes.
There are other flight tracking sites including
FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange. But Jerry Dyer and Gilly Prestwood, who run Big
Jet TV, a YouTube aviation specialty channel, said that Flightradar24 is the
app of choice for casual looky-loos and aviation buffs.
Some people use the app to estimate arrival times of
friends and family, and anxious flyers use it to feel safer about plane travel,
they said. News organizations have used flight tracking services to hunt for
clues from corporate executives’ travels. Dyer, Prestwood, and Mindaugas
Kavaliauskas, a photographer who published a book of images related to travel,
said aviation hobbyists use apps to track famous or rare planes, gawk at 3D
satellite images from cockpits and debate the merits of one type of jet versus
another.
After On Tech asked readers about technologies that
stoked their creativity, Dibble emailed us about her affection for
Flightradar24. I did not get the appeal at first, but I downloaded the app and
my mind started to fire, too.
Now I imagine fancy people or tourists on helicopter
flights hugging the virtual New York skyline. Last week, I clicked on the icon
of an airplane the app showed was miles above my neighborhood and saw that it
was headed to Paris. Sigh. Lucky them.
Dibble knows that an app is no substitute for
traveling in real life. She’ll soon be one of those people on a flight bound to
Lisbon that she’s been eyeing in Flightradar24. But she still looks at the app
several times a day.
“It’s a sense of connection to the larger world,” she said.
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