Month: October 2020

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....

My ADS-B tracker project

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 on a busy...

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,...