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FlightRadar24 crashes due to surge in users tracking SPAR19
- valevk 4y agoWhat's SPAR19 all about?
- boardwaalk 4y agoThe plane carrying Nancy Pelosi around Asia and possibly to Taiwan I presume.
- scanny 4y agoNancy Pelosi is about to land in Taiwan on that flight, China has been threatening some sort of action (military/economic/angry words) if it were to happen.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
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- 4cao 4y agoADS-B Exchange works fine: https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae503d https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae503d Edit: FR24 link for comparison: https://www.flightradar24.com/SPAR19/2ce4f83f https://www.flightradar24.com/SPAR19/2ce4f83f
- nyanpasu64 4y agoI like ADS-B Exchange and all for being a (purportedly unfiltered) data stream based off community volunteers uploading data from SDR stations (I even briefly ran a data source), but it's missing data for the middle of the flight.
- 4cao 4y agoYeah, seems they don't have much coverage in Indonesia and the Philippines. I wonder if FR24 (which was showing the flight path correctly all along) depends on private uploaders there, or do they have other data sources to fill the gaps.
- Scoundreller 4y agoI think they have some satellite-based connection points, and those feeds understandably cost $, but maybe with cubesats we’ll fill in some gaps at an affordable price (possibly delayed).
- touisteur 4y agoMight also fill in with actual ATC radars (either interrogating in Mode S or listening to ads-b) or just national infra ads-b/multilateration output. These usually cost $$$.
- mh- 4y agoUnless disabled, it'll also use extrapolated paths when a plane exits FR24's coverage area. It's called "Estimations", and is in the Visibility tab of Settings. By default it will show up to 4 hours of estimated positions. I can't say whether that's what was shown for this flight or not, as it won't show historical data for SPAR19.
- lostfocus 4y agoI think in the past they sent out "free" receivers to areas with low coverage: https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/making-the-flightradar24-network-even-stronger/ https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/making-the-flightradar24-... while the other tracking sites tend to be enthusiasts with their own hardware only.
- implements 4y agoYep, it doesn’t filter military flights (which has been interesting recently - toggle by clicking the “U” UI button)
- jollyllama 4y agoFlightaware is also working https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SPAR19 https://flightaware.com/live/flight/SPAR19 brought to you by the TCL coding language.
- nell 4y agoIn an era of unlimited scaling infrastructure, it's a shame they're struggling to capitalize on an exclusive superbowl scale marketing event. It was predictable days in advance.
- seydor 4y agoDo they really want lots of traffic? It's a very specialized website, it's not like the traffic will stick. The people who want to pay for their services are already customers. I doubt they care about random Joe
- polio 4y agoThis is exactly it. It's likely a better business decision to just crash in this scenario.
- alldayeveryday 4y agoDays is not enough advance notice, if for example they don't have a way to monetize the traffic. Unlimited scale = unlimited cost. Potentially the site crashing was the financially appropriate outcome.
- nnx 4y agoDays in advance would have been enough to prepare a static page for SPAR19 alone, updated minutely or something... would cost practically nothing, especially if served from CDN edges.
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- Scoundreller 4y ago> Your estimated wait time is more than 16 hours... Hrmmm
- dylan604 4y agoThey have to wait for the person on the plane to disembark and find a pay phone to call back to the home office to let some one know they landed safely.
- xnorswap 4y agoWhat's SPAR19 and why are so many interested? Also flightradar24 feels something that should benefit heavily from caching especially in an instance where lots of people are all tracking the same thing. Heavier caching for non-logged in users is a basic of keeping sites up against unexpected influx because the vast majority of "new" (i.e. spikey) traffic won't have accounts, and won't be as fuzzy about seeing cached data, and are harder to monetize than logged in accounts.
- ojbyrne 4y agoWill Nancy Pelosi visit Taiwan? https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/02/politics/pelosi-taiwan-risks-greater-instability-us-china-analysis/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/02/politics/pelosi-taiwan-risks-...
- Rebelgecko 4y agoWhere does Betteridge's Law come into play?
- wobblyasp 4y agoPelosi's flight into Taiwan
- dboreham 4y agoSeems like a significant security risk that it is publicly trackable? I've seen AF1 land at the airport here (Bozeman) -- it flew in to the area at high altitude then circled tightly reducing altitude until final approach. I assumed to reduce the chance of a stinger hit from mountain-men.
- dekhn 4y agoAs you noticed from AF1, the people who manage the flights of nation-level VIPs are extremely cautious and have a rich, well-informed risk model. You can imagine these airplanes have many countermeasures (SPAR19 is a C-40C, which is a military version of a 737). For all we know it was a decoy plane.
- baybal2 4y agoBTW, Nancy has just landed in the Republic of China
- pdabbadabba 4y agoFor the confused: "Republic of China" is Taiwan's official name. Yes, this makes the other China -- the People's Republic of China -- quite angry.
- kmonsen 4y agoActually no, not calling it republic of China would make the other China angry. Taiwan would like to call itself Taiwan.
- pdabbadabba 4y agoIn fact, I believe they now do both. Starting in 2005, Taiwan has started using the name "Republic of China (Taiwan)." Not that it really matters, but I wonder which would actually bothers the PRC more. I would have thought that the real source of irritation with, "Republic of China," is that it references the name used by mainland China up until the revolution of 1949, thus manifesting Taiwan's historical claim to be the legitimate Chinese government in exile.
- kmonsen 4y agoCCP wants Taiwan to claim to be China as then it is seen as an internal struggle between two Chinese factions. So the CCP takeover of the island becomes reunification. If Taiwan calls itself Taiwan and develops a separate identity at some point it becomes a struggle between two separate identities and it would not be a unification but a hostile takeover. To sum it up, most important for CCP is that Taiwan is considered Chinese. I know CCP likes to play the long game, but at some point Taiwanese cultural identity will have shifted too far for this to work. I think it is close that that point, and that in another generation it will most likely be there.
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- tjpnz 4y agoAny theories on the protracted flightpath? Was the proximity to bases in Okinawa a factor?
- phantomathkg 4y agoHypothesis would be to avoid South China Sea, instead choose a detour to get covered by all US arm presence in the the Pacific and Okinawa.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea#/media/File:South_China_Sea_claims_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_So... This is more likely to be about not overflying China/PRC's disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea - the flight certainly has to overfly part of that claim (because it in includes Taiwan/ROC), but it doesn't have to fly over all of it ... seems like some kind of carefully calibrated diplomatic message / inside baseball.
- yrcyrc 4y agoUpdate: She's just landed in Taipei
- whatever1 4y agoShowdown!
- rvz 4y ago
- MichaelCollins 4y agoThe CCP is embarrassing themselves, making threats they're to scared to carry through with, hoping the threat alone will be enough. Nancy Pelosi is flaunting those threats, showing the world that Xi Jinping has no clothes.
- thedudeabides5 4y agoThey go to Kinmen next, watch. Not today, but wheels in motion.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoMore threats. If the CCP weren't so chickenshit they would have shot her down, but they don't dare.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoThey don't gain much (and can lose a lot) by shooting down an American politician, when what they care about is Taiwan itself if anything.
- dekhn 4y agoIn what world would it make sense for CCP to shoot down Nancy Pelosi's plane? What does it achieve?
- high_5 4y agoTechnically speaking we only know the plane landed through this information. But will Pelosi set foot on Taiwanese soil?
- sct202 4y agoShe got off the plane. Taiwan livestreamed the landing and greeting when everyone got off https://youtu.be/VfzTZyZTv5I?t=1701 https://youtu.be/VfzTZyZTv5I?t=1701
- spywaregorilla 4y agoAm amused at the baby blue and pink colored suits the two people are wearing.
- paxys 4y agoI imagine she didn't go there just because she loves long plane rides.
- popotamonga 4y agoCouldn't they just write all locations say to a public s3 file, maybe separated by geo squares depending on your viewport? client would just keep polling the s3 file(s). Unlimited bandwidth (at a cost yes..)
- jjoonathan 4y agoThe core infrastructure might have calcified long before s3 even existed, but yeah, these days that's a pretty good approach.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoBack when S3 and EC2 were brand spanking new services, and EC2 didn't have persistent disks, I got to see a quite well designed analytics pipeline. The inbound tracking http requests went into a pool that aggregated them locally in mysql, then wrote out the database files to S3. A separate pool would pull down these files and merge them into a local mysql databases for the web app UI. So kindof like a very simplistic map reduce atop s3 using mysql ISAM files. It was impressively simple to keep running, and they easily scaled it to handle massive spikes related to sports events and such. The only real downside is the delay in new data hitting the UI layer, but this was built out while a lot of people still had webtrends installs kicking around, so it was perfectly acceptable for their customers.
- prescriptivist 4y agoBefore I clicked on the link I assumed this was Taylor Swifts plane.
- hammock 4y agoI flew on this one time. Yes, they play Tswift when you embark and disembark. https://www.yesterdaysairlines.com/airline-history-blog/shake-it-off-airasias-swift-bus https://www.yesterdaysairlines.com/airline-history-blog/shak...
- kklisura 4y ago> With 708,000 people tracking the aircraft upon landing in Taipei, SPAR19 is Flightradar24’s most tracked live flight of all time. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1554501909893062656 https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1554501909893062656
- owenfi 4y agoFlight…CRASHES…SPAR19. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional but this word in a high profile airline headline is a bit jarring.
- dvh 4y agoI also couldn't connect so I just searched "spar19 live" on YouTube and there were 5 livestreams so I watched that.
- _joel 4y ago> Previous job roles posted by the company suggest that it runs a mixed system infrastructure “based on a modern virtualized data center environment as well as AWS and Azure cloud services” — with the SRE role suggesting that it was building a “future private cloud based on open technologies like OpenStack, Ceph, and KVM.” [1] Sounds like they needed a monolith, single server ;) (tongue in cheek, I know it's not that simple) [1] https://thestack.technology/air-traffic-tracking-site-flightradar24-down/ https://thestack.technology/air-traffic-tracking-site-flight...
- water8 4y agoWe’re not going to Taiwan we’re going to China… what aren’t they going to be there? ;)
- water8 4y ago
- klee0102 4y agoIt didn't crash I keep checking.
- jdubz79 4y agoIts the piss in Winnie the Pooh's Cheerios Tour 2022!