US military planes in South China Sea
There are a lot of US military activity in the area between Taiwan, Hong Kong and the South China Sea. Transports, SIGINT, reconnaissance, protection of US carriers in the area… mainly conducted by the US Air Force and the US Navy. Here is a list of planes seen in...
SAM727 flying over Guangzhou with Secretary Pompeo
Today (2020-10-30), the Boeing C-32A with tail 99-0003 was spotted by my trackers over Guangzhou with the CallSign SAM727. A quick search shows a departure from Hanoi, and a current position over Japan. Probably used by Secretary Pompeo who was visiting Hanoi yesterday....
Having fun with my ADS-B tracker project
How it started Some years ago, I bumped into an article on Mashable about Jeremy Merrill using a Raspberry Pi ADS-B tracker to detect aircraft flying over his house and display the origin or destination of that plane (see article here and github there). As my place is just...
Will airlines recover from COVID-19 crisis?
I have been tracking planes in Hong Kong for few years now with my Raspberry Pi based ADSB trackers. There are few airports in range (Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Huizhou), which was giving me quite some traffic (about 2000-2200 different aircraft per day). Then came COVID-19. Many...
Sharing my database of Aircraft, Airports and Routes
I have been gathering data for few years now, from multiple sources (databases found online, some special aircraft found manually online, …). I now have more than 35000 entries in my database of aircraft, including 6,000 that I flagged as “special”, meaning military or any other interesting features (helicopters,...
G-IRTY Spitfire flying over Hong Kong in 2019
One of the most surprising catch of 2019 was for sure seeing a Spitfire in my new aircraft list! I had to check if that was correct or a mistake somewhere in the database of Mode S codes I collected. It turned out it was the real thing! The...
A Guide to Aircraft Tracking Around the World
If your a fan of Aircraft Tracking, I highly recommend the article from Global Investigative Journalism Network (or GIJN) “Planespotting: A Guide to Tracking Aircraft Around the World“. This is one of the most comprehensive article I have seen on the subject, addressing it from multiple angles (#avgeek, journalist,...
Buzzfeed trains an AI to find spy planes
An interesting article about how Buzzfeed is training an Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect spy planes circling over San Francisco (mainly law enforcement and other contractors). That’s an interesting direction… I will have a look at how to do that and detect anomalies in trajectories on my trackers. I...
Another F16 from Belgian Air Force for my tracker in Briancon
My tracker in Briancon has detected 2 new F16 from the Belgian Air Component on April 1st, 2021 (that’s how the Belgian Air Force is called). The aircraft detected so far have the tail numbers FA-87, FA-57, FA-133, FA-130, FA-101, FA-107, FA-82, FA-129 and FA-72. Belgian F16 are regularly...