7 ms·

Flight stats, entertainment, and trying to crack Widevine

109 points by jonluca 7y ago

kozak 7y ago
Would be cool to be able to see some kind of a "geek passenger instrument panel" with this information during flight. This would definitely influence my choice of an airline.
- jonluca 7y ago
  Yeah for a while a few years back some airlines would include the camera view of the aircraft from the in seat screen. With the transition to wifi entertainment that seems to have been lost, but would be pretty interesting to make a timelapse or be able to create a personalized dashboard from the raw data.
  - mattmaroon 7y ago
    It’s still on there as a screen! I found it pretty enthralling to watch from Toronto to São Paulo on a 787.
  - Youden 7y ago
    Many still do provide cameras. My Finnair flight recently had it. The coolest thing I've had was being able to listen into the pilots' radio.
  - elygre 7y ago
    That, and sometimes you could listen in on the radio traffic. Which was awesome until that time across Newfoundland, when someone started asking about the heavy turbulence. The other aircraft in the vicinity had no consolidation, recommending to “strap’em in and ride it through”. I spent the next several hours waiting for my worst flight, which never even happened.
  - Havoc 7y ago
    The a380s still have the camera stuff. Well all the a380s I've flown
- mattmaroon 7y ago
  General aviation Pilots use an app called foreflight that has a ton of flight data. You can use it on a commercial flight. It is very interesting but expensive if you’re just using it as a commercial airline passenger!
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    Check out flightradar24 for a more passenger oriented app that provides similar data (based off ads-b rather than using device sensors)
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      Bonus points: put up an RTL-SDR and feed them ADS-B data you receive. They will give you a free business account! ($50/mo value!!)
      - JorgeGT 7y ago
        Client fully compatible with a Raspberry Pi, so minimal energy consumption too.
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        Flightradar24 does that? I thought that was FlightAware, but still awesome to know!
        GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        Yup have been doing it for about 3 years now. I love how much value I get in return of little I provide (relatively).
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    WingX Pro VFR is $0.99 per year and probably gives you enough to be entertained at a much better price point. (They have higher level subs if you’re actually flying.)
  - 7y ago
niix 7y ago
This is rad.
ebbflowgo 7y ago
Neat to see the altitude over time graph
- aivisol 7y ago
  Which fluctuates only within some 25feet range, not bad at all.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Which is just about 1.5x the external height of the fuselage.
    - Gunax 7y ago
      I have always been shocked how accurate altimeters are. Although I understand the math and physics, I am intuitively shocked that a device can measure differences of 10 meters.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
o-__-o 7y ago
Panasonic holds an almost monopoly on aircraft inflight entertainment, especially on widebody planes. They run redboot Linux and have a pretty strict firewall between the plane and computer. All of what the author did was expected by the Panasonic devs hence the disclaimer. Ads-b carries a lot of this data (at a lower interval) and is available to anyone with an antenna. Sites like FlightAware will republish it as graphs or maps. There also exist apps that take ads-b data and renders flight data in a google earth type view. A part of me is really excited that we live in this time, but I’m living in constant fear that open data will disappear one day, so enjoy while you can!
- lima 7y ago
  > Panasonic holds an almost monopoly on aircraft inflight entertainment, especially on widebody planes. They run redboot Linux and have a pretty strict firewall between the plane and computer. All of what the author did was expected by the Panasonic devs hence the disclaimer. Probably got tired of people reporting it as a vulnerability and added the disclaimer.
  - o-__-o 7y ago
    Fun fact: a gentleman on a united flight found this data and tweeted saying he hacked the plane. An investigation kicked off and this disclaimer was added.
- DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
  Unrelated-but-related: why is it that the in-flight-status screen on the IFE or WiFi flight status page sometimes stops and simply shows the plane fixed and unmoving? Background: I’m a terrible flyer (I’m okay with turbulence, but unexpected manoeuvres really spook me), so on a recent SEA-ORD night flight I woke-up as we were approaching a O’Hare - doing a 180-degree turn over Lake Michigan so it was pitch black outside the window, but the IFE map showed we were over South Dakota where the flight should be straight and level, no turns for hours. So for more than just a brief moment I was convinced the plane was starting to spiral out of control like Lauda Air 004 - or it was a pilot suicide like Germanwings 9525. It wasn’t until a minute after Chicago came back into view that the IFE map refreshed with our current location. My friend I was travelling with said the map froze an hour earlier. Paranoid me thinks that if something were to go wrong with the plane that the pilots or flight attendants would shut down the IFE map or have it show false information to stop passengers from panicking. (Why yes, when I was younger I did believe the urban-myth about the brace-position only being there to preserve your jawline for later body identification through dental records)
nayuki 7y ago
> I’ve never dealt with lat/long being formatted this way, so if you know how to parse it let me know! I interpret departure_latitude = 39.525° N, departure_longitude = 75.135° W. Google Maps shows this to be Parvin State Park near Philadelphia. Looking at your big JSON dump, I noticed these fields: "td_id_gmt_offset_departure": "80005.00", "td_id_gmt_offset_destination": "00001.00", This suggests that a leading 8 (strangely in decimal rather than hex?) means negative sign. So your departure time zone was UTC-5 and your destination time zone was UTC+1.
- DocOtak 7y ago
  Almost, it is actually a degree concatenated with decimal minutes: 39525 -> 39° 52.5'N; 75135 -> 75° 13.5'W
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    Are we sure that: 00039525 doesn’t become 00°03’95.25” And 80075135 doesn’t become 80°07’51.35” I’m not an expert in this field, but that seems to make sense to me. Very possibly I’m entirely wrong too.
    - DocOtak 7y ago
      For this one, we know what the answer is since this was the "departure" location, which we know is KPHL. When decoded in assuming it's some odd DD mm.m concatenation and assuming the 8 indicates a negative, it results in being a point on runway 27R/9L of the departure airport.
    - m11a 7y ago
      The two parent comments seem correct. The 8 is a negative. i.e. it turns N into S, and E into W. The last 5 digits are in DDM format, the first two being degrees, and the last 3 being XX.X minutes. You can verify this using https://www.pgc.umn.edu/apps/convert https://www.pgc.umn.edu/apps/convert and plugging in the departure and arrival airport coordinates. The arrival long/lat matches up with the exact coordinates for AMS airport in the same format. This isn't true if you interpret the coordinates in another standard way from what I can see. Edit: Your interpretation would suggest that PHL airport is in the Indian Ocean.
layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
The graphs are not loaded on iOS.
- jonluca 7y ago
  Interesting, you're right. I wonder why - They're just `iframe`s from Google Sheets - no custom rendering or html. I'll do some research, thanks for pointing it out. Update: added a fallback to images using: ``` const iOS = /iPad|iPhone|iPod/.test(navigator.userAgent) && !window.MSStream; // iOS doesn't load google sheets embeds for some reason :/ if(iOS){ const toReplace = document.querySelectorAll('.aa-image'); for(const image of toReplace){ const imageUrl = image.id; image.outerHTML = `{% include image.html file="${imageUrl}" alt="${imageUrl}" %}` } } ```
  - chucksmash 7y ago
    Perhaps clickjacking countermeasures[1]. [1]: https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_Sheet.html https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Clickjacking_...
  - evrflx 7y ago
    This works for my iPhone, but not the iPad. I guess it is due to Apple showing the device as ‚desktop class‘ with the following user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0.4 Safari/605.1.15
UI_at_80x24 7y ago
This is the very long tail of non-metric conversion that drives me insane. This date format is unforgivable: "td_id_fltdata_date": "00181219", (1) add in leading 00 to allow for Y2k expansion (and then ignore it) (2) DDMMYY This is unnecessarily "difficult" for a human and a computer to sort and parse. Using ALL the same number of digits and following ISO 8601 already solves this (and with the padding 00's you don't need to touch this part of the software for 7900 more years!) 20191218 - Done. This can only be a holdover from a pre-PC era. Some industries move at a glacial pace when updating standards and tools. The risk to lives because of screwups (i.e. a faulty radar at Air Traffic Control) is too great to do without sufficient study and experimentation. But this can only be an unwillingness to change.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  Props to you for citing ISO 8601. Most folks don’t care :(
  - kibwen 7y ago
    See also RFC 3339, which seems to be a stricter dialect of ISO 8601. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/522251/whats-the-difference-between-iso-8601-and-rfc-3339-date-formats https://stackoverflow.com/questions/522251/whats-the-differe...
    - somacert 7y ago
      Or as I like to call it, xkcd 1179 time
  - beefhash 7y ago
    It doesn't help that getting a copy of the actual standard costs an arm and a leg[1,2], especially if you want both parts of the 2019 edition. [1] https://www.iso.org/standard/70907.html https://www.iso.org/standard/70907.html [2] https://www.iso.org/standard/70908.html https://www.iso.org/standard/70908.html
    - 7y ago
progman32 7y ago
Found the same thing a few years ago. Was a fun pastime getting the eta up on my desktop environment's status bar without having internet based documentation. From memory I used curl and jq.
rkochman 7y ago
"...what the weight on the wheels is..." Small nit, but weight-on-wheels is also a boolean.

109 points by jonluca 7y ago

Would be cool to be able to see some kind of a "geek passenger instrument panel" with this information during flight. This would definitely influence my choice of an airline.

jonluca 7y ago
Yeah for a while a few years back some airlines would include the camera view of the aircraft from the in seat screen. With the transition to wifi entertainment that seems to have been lost, but would be pretty interesting to make a timelapse or be able to create a personalized dashboard from the raw data.
- mattmaroon 7y ago
  It’s still on there as a screen! I found it pretty enthralling to watch from Toronto to São Paulo on a 787.
- Youden 7y ago
  Many still do provide cameras. My Finnair flight recently had it. The coolest thing I've had was being able to listen into the pilots' radio.
- elygre 7y ago
  That, and sometimes you could listen in on the radio traffic. Which was awesome until that time across Newfoundland, when someone started asking about the heavy turbulence. The other aircraft in the vicinity had no consolidation, recommending to “strap’em in and ride it through”. I spent the next several hours waiting for my worst flight, which never even happened.
- Havoc 7y ago
  The a380s still have the camera stuff. Well all the a380s I've flown
mattmaroon 7y ago
General aviation Pilots use an app called foreflight that has a ton of flight data. You can use it on a commercial flight. It is very interesting but expensive if you’re just using it as a commercial airline passenger!
- o-__-o 7y ago
  Check out flightradar24 for a more passenger oriented app that provides similar data (based off ads-b rather than using device sensors)
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    Bonus points: put up an RTL-SDR and feed them ADS-B data you receive. They will give you a free business account! ($50/mo value!!)
    - JorgeGT 7y ago
      Client fully compatible with a Raspberry Pi, so minimal energy consumption too.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      Flightradar24 does that? I thought that was FlightAware, but still awesome to know!
      - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        Yup have been doing it for about 3 years now. I love how much value I get in return of little I provide (relatively).
- sokoloff 7y ago
  WingX Pro VFR is $0.99 per year and probably gives you enough to be entertained at a much better price point. (They have higher level subs if you’re actually flying.)
- 7y ago

niix 7y ago

This is rad.

ebbflowgo 7y ago

Neat to see the altitude over time graph

aivisol 7y ago
Which fluctuates only within some 25feet range, not bad at all.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Which is just about 1.5x the external height of the fuselage.
  - Gunax 7y ago
    I have always been shocked how accurate altimeters are. Although I understand the math and physics, I am intuitively shocked that a device can measure differences of 10 meters.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

o-__-o 7y ago

Panasonic holds an almost monopoly on aircraft inflight entertainment, especially on widebody planes. They run redboot Linux and have a pretty strict firewall between the plane and computer. All of what the author did was expected by the Panasonic devs hence the disclaimer. Ads-b carries a lot of this data (at a lower interval) and is available to anyone with an antenna. Sites like FlightAware will republish it as graphs or maps. There also exist apps that take ads-b data and renders flight data in a google earth type view. A part of me is really excited that we live in this time, but I’m living in constant fear that open data will disappear one day, so enjoy while you can!

lima 7y ago
> Panasonic holds an almost monopoly on aircraft inflight entertainment, especially on widebody planes. They run redboot Linux and have a pretty strict firewall between the plane and computer. All of what the author did was expected by the Panasonic devs hence the disclaimer. Probably got tired of people reporting it as a vulnerability and added the disclaimer.
- o-__-o 7y ago
  Fun fact: a gentleman on a united flight found this data and tweeted saying he hacked the plane. An investigation kicked off and this disclaimer was added.
DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
Unrelated-but-related: why is it that the in-flight-status screen on the IFE or WiFi flight status page sometimes stops and simply shows the plane fixed and unmoving? Background: I’m a terrible flyer (I’m okay with turbulence, but unexpected manoeuvres really spook me), so on a recent SEA-ORD night flight I woke-up as we were approaching a O’Hare - doing a 180-degree turn over Lake Michigan so it was pitch black outside the window, but the IFE map showed we were over South Dakota where the flight should be straight and level, no turns for hours. So for more than just a brief moment I was convinced the plane was starting to spiral out of control like Lauda Air 004 - or it was a pilot suicide like Germanwings 9525. It wasn’t until a minute after Chicago came back into view that the IFE map refreshed with our current location. My friend I was travelling with said the map froze an hour earlier. Paranoid me thinks that if something were to go wrong with the plane that the pilots or flight attendants would shut down the IFE map or have it show false information to stop passengers from panicking. (Why yes, when I was younger I did believe the urban-myth about the brace-position only being there to preserve your jawline for later body identification through dental records)

nayuki 7y ago

> I’ve never dealt with lat/long being formatted this way, so if you know how to parse it let me know! I interpret departure_latitude = 39.525° N, departure_longitude = 75.135° W. Google Maps shows this to be Parvin State Park near Philadelphia. Looking at your big JSON dump, I noticed these fields: "td_id_gmt_offset_departure": "80005.00", "td_id_gmt_offset_destination": "00001.00", This suggests that a leading 8 (strangely in decimal rather than hex?) means negative sign. So your departure time zone was UTC-5 and your destination time zone was UTC+1.

DocOtak 7y ago
Almost, it is actually a degree concatenated with decimal minutes: 39525 -> 39° 52.5'N; 75135 -> 75° 13.5'W
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  Are we sure that: 00039525 doesn’t become 00°03’95.25” And 80075135 doesn’t become 80°07’51.35” I’m not an expert in this field, but that seems to make sense to me. Very possibly I’m entirely wrong too.
  - DocOtak 7y ago
    For this one, we know what the answer is since this was the "departure" location, which we know is KPHL. When decoded in assuming it's some odd DD mm.m concatenation and assuming the 8 indicates a negative, it results in being a point on runway 27R/9L of the departure airport.
  - m11a 7y ago
    The two parent comments seem correct. The 8 is a negative. i.e. it turns N into S, and E into W. The last 5 digits are in DDM format, the first two being degrees, and the last 3 being XX.X minutes. You can verify this using https://www.pgc.umn.edu/apps/convert https://www.pgc.umn.edu/apps/convert and plugging in the departure and arrival airport coordinates. The arrival long/lat matches up with the exact coordinates for AMS airport in the same format. This isn't true if you interpret the coordinates in another standard way from what I can see. Edit: Your interpretation would suggest that PHL airport is in the Indian Ocean.

layoutIfNeeded 7y ago

The graphs are not loaded on iOS.

jonluca 7y ago
Interesting, you're right. I wonder why - They're just `iframe`s from Google Sheets - no custom rendering or html. I'll do some research, thanks for pointing it out. Update: added a fallback to images using: ``` const iOS = /iPad|iPhone|iPod/.test(navigator.userAgent) && !window.MSStream; // iOS doesn't load google sheets embeds for some reason :/ if(iOS){ const toReplace = document.querySelectorAll('.aa-image'); for(const image of toReplace){ const imageUrl = image.id; image.outerHTML = `{% include image.html file="${imageUrl}" alt="${imageUrl}" %}` } } ```
- chucksmash 7y ago
  Perhaps clickjacking countermeasures[1]. [1]: https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_Sheet.html https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Clickjacking_...
- evrflx 7y ago
  This works for my iPhone, but not the iPad. I guess it is due to Apple showing the device as ‚desktop class‘ with the following user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.0.4 Safari/605.1.15

UI_at_80x24 7y ago

This is the very long tail of non-metric conversion that drives me insane. This date format is unforgivable: "td_id_fltdata_date": "00181219", (1) add in leading 00 to allow for Y2k expansion (and then ignore it) (2) DDMMYY This is unnecessarily "difficult" for a human and a computer to sort and parse. Using ALL the same number of digits and following ISO 8601 already solves this (and with the padding 00's you don't need to touch this part of the software for 7900 more years!) 20191218 - Done. This can only be a holdover from a pre-PC era. Some industries move at a glacial pace when updating standards and tools. The risk to lives because of screwups (i.e. a faulty radar at Air Traffic Control) is too great to do without sufficient study and experimentation. But this can only be an unwillingness to change.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
Props to you for citing ISO 8601. Most folks don’t care :(
- kibwen 7y ago
  See also RFC 3339, which seems to be a stricter dialect of ISO 8601. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/522251/whats-the-difference-between-iso-8601-and-rfc-3339-date-formats https://stackoverflow.com/questions/522251/whats-the-differe...
  - somacert 7y ago
    Or as I like to call it, xkcd 1179 time
- beefhash 7y ago
  It doesn't help that getting a copy of the actual standard costs an arm and a leg[1,2], especially if you want both parts of the 2019 edition. [1] https://www.iso.org/standard/70907.html https://www.iso.org/standard/70907.html [2] https://www.iso.org/standard/70908.html https://www.iso.org/standard/70908.html
  - 7y ago

progman32 7y ago

Found the same thing a few years ago. Was a fun pastime getting the eta up on my desktop environment's status bar without having internet based documentation. From memory I used curl and jq.

rkochman 7y ago

"...what the weight on the wheels is..." Small nit, but weight-on-wheels is also a boolean.