In early 2020, Christine Dibble had recently retired from the federal government and was eager to travel more, but the coronavirus outbreak put those plans on hold.
At home in Washington Grove, Maryland, Dibble started playing with a flight tracking app and it opened up heaven for her.
Flightradar24 is one of several sites that collect publicly available information about aircraft locations, flight routes, ownership details, altitude, and more for display on an interactive map. People can see details about planes and where they are going almost anywhere in the world, including Antarctica.
Dibble, a former tech 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 is that it sparks my imagination,” Dibble told me. ‘What are the people doing there on that plane? Are they on vacation? For business?”
As she peers at airplane icons in the app, Dibble feels excited for tourists she imagines on the flight from a nearby airport to Lisbon. She sympathizes 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 near a Central Intelligence Agency training base. Dibble, her husband and daughter dreamed up scenarios of a Russian oligarch being led away in handcuffs.
Flight tracking sites are another example of technology that makes obscure information accessible and relevant to us mere mortals and helps us connect with others. It’s pretty amazing that we can Google what we’re curious about or video chat with friends far away. Tracking flights on the other side of the world is another wonder.
Flightradar24 started marketing a Swedish ticket booking website in the 2000s, its communications director, Ian Petchenik, told me. Using a technology called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, the company’s founders and employees began installing ADS-B receivers on rooftops in Sweden to pick up radio signals from aircraft that relay their location to other aircraft and air traffic controllers.
The interactive map of air traffic proved to be more popular than the booking service. The flight tracking service was born, Petchenik said.
Now there are about 34,000 Flightradar24 receivers that people around the world have agreed to place on their homes and commercial buildings and other places. Flightradar24 combines those signals with other information, including a database of aircraft owners and commercial aircraft flight schedules, to compile the data into a digital map.
You may be wondering: is this a security risk? Representatives from the Federal Aviation Administration told me that the agency has limited available data on aircraft related to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice. For example, Air Force One does not appear in Flightradar24. Civil aircraft owners may also impose restrictions on their disclosure of travel information.
Petchenik believes it is important that real-time information about activities in the shared airspace remains public.
Flightradar24 told me that tracking service usage peaked when the pandemic kept many would-be travelers like Dibble at home. And last week, some people were unable to access Flightradar24 because so many users followed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s circuitous flight route to Taiwan, which was taken to evade potential conflicts with Chinese military aircraft.
There are other flight tracking sites including FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange. But Jerry Dyer and Gilly Prestwood, who run Big Jet TV, an aviation specialty YouTube channel, said Flightradar24 is the app of choice for casual looky-less and aviation enthusiasts alike.
Some people use the app to estimate arrival times from friends and family, and anxious fliers use it to feel safer about plane travel, they said. News organizations have used flight tracking services to look for clues to company executives’ travels. Dyer, Prestwood and Mindaugas Kavaliauskas, a photographer who published a book of photos about travel, said aviation hobbyists use apps to track famous or rare aircraft, stare at 3D satellite images of cockpits and discuss the merits of one type of jet versus another.
After On Tech asked readers about technologies that sparked their creativity, Dibble emailed us about her affection for Flightradar24. At first I didn’t get the call but I downloaded the app and my mind started firing as well.
Now I imagine beautiful people or tourists on helicopter rides hugging the virtual Manhattan skyline. Last week I clicked on the icon of an airplane that the app showed was miles above my neighborhood and saw it was headed for Paris. sigh. Lucky them.
Dibble knows that an app is no substitute for real life travel. She will soon be one of those people on a flight to Lisbon that she watched in Flightradar24. But she still looks at the app several times a day.
“It’s a sense of connection to the bigger world,” she said.
Before we go…
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Russian propaganda thrives in languages other than English: Governments and internet companies have crushed the Russian government’s propaganda after the country invaded Ukraine. But my colleagues Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel found that Russian state sources continued to use social media in Spanish and Arabic to mislead people about the war, undermining the global campaign to isolate and punish Russia.
Related: Online rumours, hate speech and false information are disrupting Kenya’s elections, my colleague Abdi Latif Dahir reported.
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Internet networks are a battleground in war: My colleagues Adam Satariano and Scott Reinhard described how Russian authorities diverted mobile and internet data in occupied cities in Ukraine through Russia’s censored networks. Ukrainian officials said the internet occupation isolates people from their loved ones and blocks access to vital information.
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Is “authenticity” just another form of performance? BeReal, an app that encourages people to take a selfie and photo with the rear camera at an unpredictable time every day, has become popular among young people as an antidote to social media pressures for perfection. In Wired, social media researchers Brooke Erin Duffy and Ysabel Gerrard traced the history and psychology of false promises of “authenticity” disseminated by companies.
Hug for this
You have to read Linda Qiu’s article about Hair-E and other beagles putting their noses to work for customs and border protection. They sniff prohibited foods or plants to prevent them from entering the United States.
