While this seems legit, it's worth noting that ADSB, the RF message protocol used for most 'live' location stats in FlightRadar24, has no form of authentication. Nevermind the network protocol weaknesses, trolling FR24 would require little more than a $300 radio and some free software.
If anyone does that, some very professional people who love hunting radio emitters (so much that they've made it their life's work) will start triangulating him. They'll have a blast, and they're very good at it. And they'll come accompanied by some plentifully armed people who like to use force, and they're very good at it.
Yes, and it’s not just for these sites but ATC too... although that’s been true of all aviation coms and nav technologies. Someone with some radio gear and a basic understanding of how these systems work could mess things up big time. That’s why, at least in the US, unauthorized broadcasting on aviation Nav or Com frequencies is a deadly serious thing that the Feds don’t take lightly.
For a much simpler threat model, the FAA is also deadly serious about laser illumination of aircraft and will involve local law enforcement and the FBI. Don’t let your buddy who got some crazy powerful laser pointer be stupid and point it toward an airplane or helicopter.
> You'd also be trolling the air traffic control system
The safe way of avoiding that is to inject it directly into the FR24 feed, rather than broadcasting it as ADS-B.
A considerable proportion of their data is receiving from end-users running their own receivers, rather than the FR24-branded receiver. They do reject spurious data from one receiver but genuine-looking data would be hard to detect and discard.
It's certainly real, the flight path is being tracked in real time by thousands of receivers. You'd need to fly around your transponder to make that, at which point it's not illegal any longer. But if you started DDoS'ing a single point in airspace you're going to go to jail very quickly.
That's already been demonstrated at defcon. Here's Brad Haines tricking open source flight tracking software into displaying YOURMOM, a connecting flight with the San Francisco International air control tower. Demonstrated in safe conditions in a faraday cage, of course.
I was thinking of this exact talk. IIRC, He never gets a hold of the more expensive plane-to-plane transmitters and of course, he wouldn't transmit anything on them if he did, but he does bring up a lot of concerns and I'm wondering what the FAA and other countries orgs have in place to detect malicious signals, track them and stop/arrest them.
"the RF message protocol used for most 'live' location stats in FlightRadar24, has no form of authentication."
I wonder if this is a potential security risk, considering ADS-B is not only used for flight tracking but also air traffic control and collision avoidance?
Could a bad actor (using a drone, perhaps) broadcast a false signal and trick aircraft into performing collision avoidance manoeuvres? Or flood the ADS-B bandwidth with false signals to confuse ATC?
Yes. At which point, the pilots will see what is going on, take manual control, gather data for ATC's inevitable response, and use traditional instruments to navigate the airplane to a safe landing. Passengers would likely be unaware. In the United States, a report would subsequently be filed with the ASRS.
They could be employing some verification by using multilateration (time (difference) of arrival) between their receivers, which would make it a lot more resistant to spoofing.
Yeah, ADSB is a position reporting system that has to work between aircraft with no prearrangement. Such a thing is inherently insecure by the nature of what it is.
Not so. A PKI could have been put in place and would have allowed "strangers" to securely authenticate and set up a secure session, but I suppose the expense was not deemed worthwhile. Also possible is that such a session would be point-to-point, and an area handshake, while possible, would have been less reliable and more complex, while also loading the bandwidth with more radio traffic and thus increasing the noise floor overall. ATC running costs would have increased as well.
So it's not that it couldn't be done or is inherently insecure, it's that a choice was made (either by omission or by intent) to not do it.
It's a one way protocol. Pure broadcast. No session.
Note that anyone with a hundred bucks can buy a used aviation voice radio and do all the spoofing they want. It just isn't a problem because people don't like jail. The problem of getting acceptable reliability in an aviation electronics environment is tough enough that deliberate attacks fall below the noise.
Both couple and few can mean either a specific number (2 for couple, 3 for few) or an indeterminate small number. They are synonyms for the second usage.
I hadn't known a couple to mean more than 2, but the Cambridge dictionary does seem to agree[1].. however the Oxford Dictionaries site only seems to indicate only 2[2]. In this case, I'll update my correction ;)
You also instantly knew what the person meant by a couple because this is an extremely common usage. Oxford agrees as well, if you use their US dictionary [1].
In the US, "a couple" is synonymous for a "a few" or "several". One would say, "it'll take a couple of hours" or "I'll be away for a couple of days" and mean two or more. This might be specific to American English.
You could also have said that where you come from, couple means two people in a romantic relationship. This doesn't mean that it can't also have other definitions. Every US English dictionary I checked has "an indefinite small number" listed as one of the definitions, and that's a much more common usage in my (US) experience than using couple to mean exactly 2.
Regardless of whether people will use a "couple" to mean an indeterminate small number that may be more than exactly two, it doesn't mean 16 jets, as 16 is a large number of jets to be doing something together, unless one is intentionally understating. How many planes are in the air at a time? "A couple"
Speculating here, but pilots have flight hour requirements for various certifications. Maybe this is a flight that had to happen to log hours but isn’t otherwise necessary so the pilot decided to have some fun.
The Hamburg XFW Airport is used by Airbus to test their new A380 just before delivery. This Christmas flight was the First Flight of this Tail ID so I would guess that it is a new A380 being tested.
The second flight of this A380 looks more like what we usually see here for these kinds of Test flights[1]. Back and forth usually near Hamburg or over Berlin.
I imagine an airliner flying a pattern this large would take the involvement of more than just the pilot/crew. ATC, airline's planning/staffing group, ground crew (fueling), etc.
This type of thing is popular with runners and cyclists. Search for "strava art" The hard part is finding roads that match your desired picture. Or findind a picture with the given roads. Planes have it easy.
Major airports and some routes between clusters of major airports, such as western Europe to the US east coast are already quite crowded with several at capacity.
Also, flight radar, especially at the zoomed out views, looks a lot more crowded than it really is, the airplane-icons are huge.
Crowding is a problem at airports, because each runway can only handle so many planes per hour.
Outside of that, the sky is a really big place. Not quite big enough that you can completely ignore collision avoidance, but big enough that you can pack in a lot more traffic than we currently do.
If you watch on a clear night from the roof of my building in Manhattan, you can see about 3-4 planes at a time lined up to land at Newark. Sometimes it seems like the Berlin airlift because they just keep coming.
One of the great things about the Berlin airlift is the way that they invented a huge amount of what is now standard high-capacity aircraft handling, on incredibly short notice (and in order to accomplish something fairly heroic). This includes things like standard routes and approaches, diversion procedures, pure-IFR (instrument) operations, and more. The family resemblance between arrivals to Newark Airport and Tempelhof is not accidental.
(Which reminds me, cycling down the runway at Tempelhof is still on my bucket list. I should go to Berlin this summer...)
You should. It’s very nice there during summer and there are a ton of pretty cool and informative info panels on the history of Tempelhof and the airlift. Bring a grill and a kite!
I think they have to get in a certain amount of mileage, time and different movements. Flight testing is probably something we don't want bean counters trying to skimp money on.
I wish I had saved the URL, but when the 787 was being tested, the flight test team had a public-facing website that gave a lot of very interesting information about the test protocols and how they were being run.
Imagine a flight team basically waiting with bags packed, for the right atmospheric conditions to appear anywhere in the world to fly there and go through a set of test cases.
Have you considered the time you spent typing this, the energy your computer and the HN server processing and storing it, the bytes that had to be transmitted to thousands (hundreds of thousands??) of computers around the world across who knows how many hops along the way for the routes to each of those computers, the expense of CPUs and graphics cards processing and displaying it around the world, on mobile devices, etc.
Seems you've also wasted power and contributed CO2 as well? And now so have I :)
"Seems you've also wasted power and contributed CO2 as well?"
CO2 alone assuming there are no hot chilli involved:)
edit: on a more serious note, companies don't waste fuel for no reason, so I'm sure it was a test flight which they decided to fly in a creative way to bring more eyes to the brand. People wandering around every day, every year, in elephant sized pickups doing things a small car would be enough for are a much worse source of pollution.
Boeing has done this before when they needed to make a long test flight but didn't have to go anywhere in particular for it. If you have to cruise around for X hours and end up back where you started, may as well trace out an amusing shape while you're at it. This looks like some sort of Airbus test flight so probably the same idea.
Is this a joke? If not what would be the point of this, seriously? Reminds me of drones writing the name of a Pharmaceutical product into the blue sky of Toronto, a few years back.
I believe it's described as a "test flight", so the only purpose is to fly around for a few hours and watch the instruments .. so you might as well add a few lazy turns in and draw a pattern. So long as it's outside major air routes and military airspace it's in nobody's way.
So, yes, looks like somebody having a blast during Advent season. :-)