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Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

There's also https://opensky-network.org/

Their API is actually a bit more open than adsbexchange's

How is the data coverage compared to flightradar?

Last time I looked closely it was similar in North America and Europe. Asia, Africa, and over the oceans had some pretty big gaps.

There's also no delay on the data, although I think Flightradar and Flightaware dropped the 5 minute delay they used to have. Flightradar censors a lot of corporate jets and military/law enforcement aircraft but I don't think Opensky does. In fact one of either Opensky or adsbexchange even has a special flag in their REST API for "interesting" aircraft

The delay was a rule from the FAA for radar data provided by them, ADS-B plots have always been real-time. I am guessing (from the lack of orange icons anymore) that the ADS-B coverage is good enough now that FR24 is not using FAA feeds any more.

> I think Flightradar and Flightaware dropped the 5 minute delay they used to have

I was using Flightradar yesterday and visually tracking planes, seems like about a 10 second delay.

Using their UI, I can't seem to find the "interesting aircraft" tag. Here's what I see:

  * No data
  * No ADS-B Emitter Category Information
  * Light (<15500 lbs)
  * Small (15500 to 75000 lbs)
  * Large (75500 to 300000 lbs)
  * High Vortex Large (aircraft such as B-757
  * Heavy (> 300000 lbs)
  * High Performance (> 5g acceleration and 400 kts)
  * Rotorcraft
  * Glider / sailplane
  * Lighter-than-air
  * Parachutist / Skydiver
  * Ultralight / hang-glider / paraglider
  * Reserved
  * Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
  * Space / Trans-atmospheric vehicle
  * Surface Vehicle – Emergency Vehicle
  * Surface Vehicle – Service Vehicle
  * Point Obstacle (includes tethered balloons)
  * Cluster Obstacle
  * Line Obstacle

Yeah that was actually with adsbexchange (https://www.adsbexchange.com/currently-airborne-interesting-...).

That's really interesting, there are two Project Balloons high over the Brasilian Amazon.

> Flightradar censors a lot of corporate jets and military/law enforcement aircraft

Yes, this is disappointing. In the past I had seen military planes on there. I even saw fighters practising dogfighting over the North Sea. But more recently I've seen interesting aircraft fly over, such as large four-engine planes at altitude outside of normal commercial flight paths, but they just don't appear on flightradar. It's stupid because I can see the damn thing. I need to figure out an alternative to flightradar, it seems.

ADS-B Exchange [0] has a tag for military aircraft, right now it's showing a whole bunch of military aircraft (German, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, UK, US) over central Europe.

[0] https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html

Cool, that looks much better, thanks.

Note that even the Swedish spy plane is using Ads-b while flying along the baltic International border zone taunting Russia but the migs answering the taunt is not. Also flying dangerously close to the spy plane (10 m reported once). However the US spy planes are also mostly flying with the transponder on there.

Some activists were using this kind of service to track dictator's flights to track stolen money [1]. If said dictator's can block their aircraft, the misappropriated funds would be easier to sneak out of the country.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700445

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