8 ms·

Airframes.io an aircraft-related aggregator for ACARS, VDL, HFDL and SATCOM data

146 points by lsllc 4y ago

therockspush 4y ago
Guessing this is posted as a reaction to adsbexchange getting bought. Is this where people are moving?
- realitysballs 4y ago
  My exact question as well…where is the next one?
  - xrayarx 4y ago
    https://www.adsbhub.org/ https://www.adsbhub.org/ https://opensky-network.org/ https://opensky-network.org/ https://plane.watch/ https://plane.watch/ Some alternatives to adsb exchange. For people who just want to look up planes, opensky is probably best. For people who want to feed their data to a different place, the answer is more difficult. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 for a more detailed discussion.
rektide 4y ago
There's quite the chorus of "Everyone is moving to airframes.io" or other similarly phrased posts in the ADS-B Exchange buyout thread[1]. Based on what I'm seeing, I feel like this is probably a premature place to settle on. 1. If you go to https://github.com/airframesio/ https://github.com/airframesio/ , it talks about how they want to eventually open source stuff. But mercy, like 90% of their stuff is private right now. 2. The Airframes roadmap has basically not been touched since 2019. https://trello.com/b/1vq5pHNq/acars-server-public-board https://trello.com/b/1vq5pHNq/acars-server-public-board (linked to as the "Airframes Public Trello Board" on airframes.io about page, both owned/authored by Kevin). 3. I also have found no public API documentation for reading or querying data. There appears to be a webapp one could pretty easily reverse engineer, but I haven't found any ToS or usage documentation that grant any rights to use the data. I would absolutely not go to airframes.io in it's current state. Side note, I think this is a super fascinating use-case for what p2p might want to target. Trying to draw together & perhaps correlate & index many highly active streams of data is a very compelling (and hard) problem. [1] https://www.jetnet.com/news/jetnet-acquires-ads-b-exchange.html https://www.jetnet.com/news/jetnet-acquires-ads-b-exchange.h... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355
- dx034 4y ago
  Also, why not support Opensky which has an academic background and is already well established?
  - rektide 4y ago
    I want very much to believe in both projects. Both seem well intended. Alas, for many similar reasons I'm unconvinced by Opensky as well. There are some projects up[1] but there doesn't appear to be any public development for the vast majority of the work. There are decent API docs, and ToS, which is a positive. However the rate limits are pretty low (1000 calls/day[2]) & the data does not appear to have any other distributions available. The internet has massive amounts of invisible labor that go into keeping communities & systems afloat. It's amazing how far it gets us. But it's always unclear, how do these projects scale as needed? What happens as costs grow? Lets look briefly at the example of another big data operator out there, npm, the javascript package manager & website/repository of packages. Npm was owned by Isaac Schlueter, who created in 2009. In 2020, IrisCouch volunteered to provide hosting services for free. They were acquired by Nodejitsu, who in 2013 ran a "Scalenpm" campaign to crowdsource some funding. In 2013 Isaac created npm, inc & began hosting the repo. Microsoft bought npm in 2020, & so far npm has continued to operate a free public registry. Figuring out how to keep this project going across a decade was hard work, with enormous sums spent & tons of work poured in. I know much less, but, like, Java's earlier pretty-big Maven ecosystem seems largely to have existed under the benevolent hand of SonaType (although other repositories have come and gone). There's definitely some goal/dream, that projects like IPFS or Nostro or someone can help marshal & make this data available. There's still a host of other sub-problems to figuring out how something like flight tracking or package managing would actually work atop such a system. Search & discovery, authenticity, trying to effectively index/collate data to make it consumeable are all various extra levels of problem, where again centralized infrastructure plus distributed storage might work, but ideally, we could really distribute the work out. Until then, it feels like we're kind of stuck trusting benevolent for now leaders, who have limited time and hardware resources to share. [1] https://github.com/openskynetwork https://github.com/openskynetwork [2] https://openskynetwork.github.io/opensky-api/rest.html#limitations-for-opensky-users https://openskynetwork.github.io/opensky-api/rest.html#limit...
metaphor 4y ago
Is it just me or is the live message feed going ballistic?
- CSSer 4y ago
  It's not just you.
  - irthomasthomas 4y ago
    I'm glad they chose to use transparency in the drop down menu, so that I can still see the live feed going crazy behind it. Makes in to sort of a game to try and navigate. No good if you have epilepsy, I imagine.
    - shapefrog 4y ago
      I am not sure why they thought it was a good idea to include a live feed like that. 1000's of stations sending in 100's++ messages a second ...
      - irthomasthomas 4y ago
        It was probably fun and useful, the first week they built it. Is this an example of catastrophic success?
        kevinelliott 4y ago
        This is correct. It was there to show some value early on, but a complete redesign has been in the works for a couple of months now.
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  They probably can benefit from a) stop auto-scrolling when user is scrolling b) having a "throttle" slider to actually allow reading before a message zooms by.
jjcon 4y ago
The (formerly) official discord group has cut ties with ADSB exchange and is suggesting everyone go to airframes after the recent acquisition. Don't know much about airframes or why they picked them yet though. https://web.archive.org/web/20230125164809/https://www.adsbexchange.com/discord/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230125164809/https://www.adsbe...
- chrisbolt 4y ago
  Probably related to the acquisition of ASDB exchange by Jetnet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355
  - jjcon 4y ago
    Sorry, I meant I don’t know much about airframes.io or why they chose them, edited my comment to clarify.
chinathrow 4y ago
So when I joined ADS-B Exchange as a feeder, it was an Inc., owned by a single individual. Airframes.io is also owned by a single individual. Make your own conclusions.
- dx034 4y ago
  I've said it in another comment, but I believe Opensky could be the most trustworthy alternative. This is driven by academics so the likelihood for them to sell out seems a bit lower.
  - chinathrow 4y ago
    But you will not get data access easily.
cjrp 4y ago
ACARS can be more interesting than just the positional data which FR24/ADSBExchange plot. Plain-text comms. between pilots and their company, ATC, etc.
- kevinelliott 4y ago
  That's right! ACARS has some very interesting information in it. Just a few things of notable interest: - realtime routing plans/changes - OOOI (out/off/on/in) revealing when an airframe takes off or lands - departure, destination airports and gates - weather and other flight bag data - airline / flight crew communication - flight crew / airport communication - positional data (which can be useful to augment or verify when ADS-B data is not available) It has been a time consuming process to do research on some of the extended text (see: https://github.com/airframesio/acars-message-documentation https://github.com/airframesio/acars-message-documentation), but we hope to keep at it.
irthomasthomas 4y ago
I have an RTL SDR that I haven't used yet. Can anyone recommend good Linux software for this? And is it possible to do ACARS and SATCOM at the same time on one device?
- shapefrog 4y ago
  https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts If you want to go overboard and do it with docker - this is as good a starting point as I can recommend.
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I used to have fun tracking flights over my previous home using a little usb rtl-sdr antenna attached to a raspberry pi and leveraging the dump1090 software. I moved homes, and got too lazy to re-set things up...but that dump1090 software did the trick back then. Its been a few years, so there could be better software nowadays. dump1090 was a bit of work to do the initial software setup, but thereafter was easy. The 2 versions that i recall back in the day... https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 (original i think?) https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 (the form?) Have fun!
moffkalast 4y ago
An .io service named after something plane related that's ACTUALLY about aviation? This is physically impossible, I'm absolutely gobsmacked. Are we sure it isn't some new JS framework in disguise?
- smcl 4y ago
  I think there's something I'm missing - what's the io/aviation connection? I thought dot-io was "British Indian Ocean Territory" and was co-opted by tech startups looking for a domain that wasn't squatted in the usual .com/net/org TLDs
  - JoBrad 4y ago
    I think the joke is the inscarcity of tech groups that have chosen an aviation-themed .io domain to show off their venture.
    - owlninja 4y ago
      Is it supposed to be aviation themed though?
      - dewey 4y ago
        "Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service"
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - core-utility 4y ago
        A lot of tech (.e.g frameworks, etc.) tend to choose aviation themes for their naming
        tablespoon 4y ago
jcpham2 4y ago
FWIW A site that listed exactly which Airlines Owned which airplanes and the model and tail number of the airplane would be super useful to me personally
- pdx_flyer 4y ago
  Like https://www.airfleets.net/home/ https://www.airfleets.net/home/?
kevinelliott 4y ago
Ahoy! Thanks to whoever posted a link to Airframes here on HN. I'm the founder of the project. It's been a bit of a crazy 24 hours, and I haven't had enough time to fully surface and understand the impact that the ADSB Exchange sale has on everyone, the community, and Airframes. Most of the Airframes effort has been fairly heads down, built in a tiny corner of the community and was not prepared for the events of the last day. Until now, most people weren't even familiar with technologies such as ACARS or VDL, limited to a mostly a small cross section of the community. It has been a careful and deliberate effort to grow feeders & ingests slowly due to the nature of the data and infrastructure/storage needed, from both discovery (figuring out the data structures) and process (how to make use of it) perspectives. Requiring much of the efforts on the backend that the currently simple web app does not exactly reveal. A new web app in development (there are some obvious and glaring issues/quirks with it now), and several other components, such as a desktop app, a mobile app, and a multi-architecture radio-focused OS to easily setup feeders (to Airframes, and the other aggregators) that will expand to other radio interests in time. There has been a lot of preliminary work on each of these. The plan is to open source much of this over time. If there is interest, I'm happy to elaborate more. I have been very transparent about the development process and implementations on the Discord in realtime. You are welcome to explore the dev channels there to get more background in the meantime. Note that due to current events, I am taking on higher traffic than usual, unexpectedly, and everyone is still trying to understand what the impact of the recent events are.

146 points by lsllc 4y ago

therockspush 4y ago

Guessing this is posted as a reaction to adsbexchange getting bought. Is this where people are moving?

realitysballs 4y ago
My exact question as well…where is the next one?
- xrayarx 4y ago
  https://www.adsbhub.org/ https://www.adsbhub.org/ https://opensky-network.org/ https://opensky-network.org/ https://plane.watch/ https://plane.watch/ Some alternatives to adsb exchange. For people who just want to look up planes, opensky is probably best. For people who want to feed their data to a different place, the answer is more difficult. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 for a more detailed discussion.

rektide 4y ago

There's quite the chorus of "Everyone is moving to airframes.io" or other similarly phrased posts in the ADS-B Exchange buyout thread[1]. Based on what I'm seeing, I feel like this is probably a premature place to settle on. 1. If you go to https://github.com/airframesio/ https://github.com/airframesio/ , it talks about how they want to eventually open source stuff. But mercy, like 90% of their stuff is private right now. 2. The Airframes roadmap has basically not been touched since 2019. https://trello.com/b/1vq5pHNq/acars-server-public-board https://trello.com/b/1vq5pHNq/acars-server-public-board (linked to as the "Airframes Public Trello Board" on airframes.io about page, both owned/authored by Kevin). 3. I also have found no public API documentation for reading or querying data. There appears to be a webapp one could pretty easily reverse engineer, but I haven't found any ToS or usage documentation that grant any rights to use the data. I would absolutely not go to airframes.io in it's current state. Side note, I think this is a super fascinating use-case for what p2p might want to target. Trying to draw together & perhaps correlate & index many highly active streams of data is a very compelling (and hard) problem. [1] https://www.jetnet.com/news/jetnet-acquires-ads-b-exchange.html https://www.jetnet.com/news/jetnet-acquires-ads-b-exchange.h... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355

dx034 4y ago
Also, why not support Opensky which has an academic background and is already well established?
- rektide 4y ago
  I want very much to believe in both projects. Both seem well intended. Alas, for many similar reasons I'm unconvinced by Opensky as well. There are some projects up[1] but there doesn't appear to be any public development for the vast majority of the work. There are decent API docs, and ToS, which is a positive. However the rate limits are pretty low (1000 calls/day[2]) & the data does not appear to have any other distributions available. The internet has massive amounts of invisible labor that go into keeping communities & systems afloat. It's amazing how far it gets us. But it's always unclear, how do these projects scale as needed? What happens as costs grow? Lets look briefly at the example of another big data operator out there, npm, the javascript package manager & website/repository of packages. Npm was owned by Isaac Schlueter, who created in 2009. In 2020, IrisCouch volunteered to provide hosting services for free. They were acquired by Nodejitsu, who in 2013 ran a "Scalenpm" campaign to crowdsource some funding. In 2013 Isaac created npm, inc & began hosting the repo. Microsoft bought npm in 2020, & so far npm has continued to operate a free public registry. Figuring out how to keep this project going across a decade was hard work, with enormous sums spent & tons of work poured in. I know much less, but, like, Java's earlier pretty-big Maven ecosystem seems largely to have existed under the benevolent hand of SonaType (although other repositories have come and gone). There's definitely some goal/dream, that projects like IPFS or Nostro or someone can help marshal & make this data available. There's still a host of other sub-problems to figuring out how something like flight tracking or package managing would actually work atop such a system. Search & discovery, authenticity, trying to effectively index/collate data to make it consumeable are all various extra levels of problem, where again centralized infrastructure plus distributed storage might work, but ideally, we could really distribute the work out. Until then, it feels like we're kind of stuck trusting benevolent for now leaders, who have limited time and hardware resources to share. [1] https://github.com/openskynetwork https://github.com/openskynetwork [2] https://openskynetwork.github.io/opensky-api/rest.html#limitations-for-opensky-users https://openskynetwork.github.io/opensky-api/rest.html#limit...

metaphor 4y ago

Is it just me or is the live message feed going ballistic?

CSSer 4y ago
It's not just you.
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  I'm glad they chose to use transparency in the drop down menu, so that I can still see the live feed going crazy behind it. Makes in to sort of a game to try and navigate. No good if you have epilepsy, I imagine.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    I am not sure why they thought it was a good idea to include a live feed like that. 1000's of stations sending in 100's++ messages a second ...
    - irthomasthomas 4y ago
      It was probably fun and useful, the first week they built it. Is this an example of catastrophic success?
      - kevinelliott 4y ago
        This is correct. It was there to show some value early on, but a complete redesign has been in the works for a couple of months now.
noisy_boy 4y ago
They probably can benefit from a) stop auto-scrolling when user is scrolling b) having a "throttle" slider to actually allow reading before a message zooms by.

jjcon 4y ago

The (formerly) official discord group has cut ties with ADSB exchange and is suggesting everyone go to airframes after the recent acquisition. Don't know much about airframes or why they picked them yet though. https://web.archive.org/web/20230125164809/https://www.adsbexchange.com/discord/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230125164809/https://www.adsbe...

chrisbolt 4y ago
Probably related to the acquisition of ASDB exchange by Jetnet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355
- jjcon 4y ago
  Sorry, I meant I don’t know much about airframes.io or why they chose them, edited my comment to clarify.

chinathrow 4y ago

So when I joined ADS-B Exchange as a feeder, it was an Inc., owned by a single individual. Airframes.io is also owned by a single individual. Make your own conclusions.

dx034 4y ago
I've said it in another comment, but I believe Opensky could be the most trustworthy alternative. This is driven by academics so the likelihood for them to sell out seems a bit lower.
- chinathrow 4y ago
  But you will not get data access easily.

cjrp 4y ago

ACARS can be more interesting than just the positional data which FR24/ADSBExchange plot. Plain-text comms. between pilots and their company, ATC, etc.

kevinelliott 4y ago
That's right! ACARS has some very interesting information in it. Just a few things of notable interest: - realtime routing plans/changes - OOOI (out/off/on/in) revealing when an airframe takes off or lands - departure, destination airports and gates - weather and other flight bag data - airline / flight crew communication - flight crew / airport communication - positional data (which can be useful to augment or verify when ADS-B data is not available) It has been a time consuming process to do research on some of the extended text (see: https://github.com/airframesio/acars-message-documentation https://github.com/airframesio/acars-message-documentation), but we hope to keep at it.

irthomasthomas 4y ago

I have an RTL SDR that I haven't used yet. Can anyone recommend good Linux software for this? And is it possible to do ACARS and SATCOM at the same time on one device?

shapefrog 4y ago
https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts If you want to go overboard and do it with docker - this is as good a starting point as I can recommend.
mxuribe 4y ago
I used to have fun tracking flights over my previous home using a little usb rtl-sdr antenna attached to a raspberry pi and leveraging the dump1090 software. I moved homes, and got too lazy to re-set things up...but that dump1090 software did the trick back then. Its been a few years, so there could be better software nowadays. dump1090 was a bit of work to do the initial software setup, but thereafter was easy. The 2 versions that i recall back in the day... https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 https://github.com/antirez/dump1090 (original i think?) https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 (the form?) Have fun!

moffkalast 4y ago

An .io service named after something plane related that's ACTUALLY about aviation? This is physically impossible, I'm absolutely gobsmacked. Are we sure it isn't some new JS framework in disguise?

smcl 4y ago
I think there's something I'm missing - what's the io/aviation connection? I thought dot-io was "British Indian Ocean Territory" and was co-opted by tech startups looking for a domain that wasn't squatted in the usual .com/net/org TLDs
- JoBrad 4y ago
  I think the joke is the inscarcity of tech groups that have chosen an aviation-themed .io domain to show off their venture.
  - owlninja 4y ago
    Is it supposed to be aviation themed though?
    - dewey 4y ago
      "Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service"
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - core-utility 4y ago
      A lot of tech (.e.g frameworks, etc.) tend to choose aviation themes for their naming
      - tablespoon 4y ago

jcpham2 4y ago

FWIW A site that listed exactly which Airlines Owned which airplanes and the model and tail number of the airplane would be super useful to me personally

pdx_flyer 4y ago
Like https://www.airfleets.net/home/ https://www.airfleets.net/home/?

kevinelliott 4y ago

Ahoy! Thanks to whoever posted a link to Airframes here on HN. I'm the founder of the project. It's been a bit of a crazy 24 hours, and I haven't had enough time to fully surface and understand the impact that the ADSB Exchange sale has on everyone, the community, and Airframes. Most of the Airframes effort has been fairly heads down, built in a tiny corner of the community and was not prepared for the events of the last day. Until now, most people weren't even familiar with technologies such as ACARS or VDL, limited to a mostly a small cross section of the community. It has been a careful and deliberate effort to grow feeders & ingests slowly due to the nature of the data and infrastructure/storage needed, from both discovery (figuring out the data structures) and process (how to make use of it) perspectives. Requiring much of the efforts on the backend that the currently simple web app does not exactly reveal. A new web app in development (there are some obvious and glaring issues/quirks with it now), and several other components, such as a desktop app, a mobile app, and a multi-architecture radio-focused OS to easily setup feeders (to Airframes, and the other aggregators) that will expand to other radio interests in time. There has been a lot of preliminary work on each of these. The plan is to open source much of this over time. If there is interest, I'm happy to elaborate more. I have been very transparent about the development process and implementations on the Discord in realtime. You are welcome to explore the dev channels there to get more background in the meantime. Note that due to current events, I am taking on higher traffic than usual, unexpectedly, and everyone is still trying to understand what the impact of the recent events are.