[HN Gopher] Airframes.io an aircraft-related aggregator for ACAR...
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Airframes.io an aircraft-related aggregator for ACARS, VDL, HFDL
and SATCOM data
Author : lsllc
Score : 142 points
Date : 2023-01-26 03:21 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (app.airframes.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (app.airframes.io)
| therockspush wrote:
| Guessing this is posted as a reaction to adsbexchange getting
| bought.
|
| Is this where people are moving?
| realitysballs wrote:
| My exact question as well...where is the next one?
| xrayarx wrote:
| https://www.adsbhub.org/
|
| https://opensky-network.org/
|
| 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 for
| a more detailed discussion.
| kevinelliott wrote:
| 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.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 (original i think?)
|
| https://github.com/MalcolmRobb/dump1090 (the form?)
|
| Have fun!
| jjcon wrote:
| 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.adsbe...
| chrisbolt wrote:
| Probably related to the acquisition of ASDB exchange by Jetnet:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355
| jjcon wrote:
| Sorry, I meant I don't know much about airframes.io or why
| they chose them, edited my comment to clarify.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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?
| someweirdperson wrote:
| The tld for aviation is .aero.
| keraf wrote:
| Not available to everyone though.
|
| > Only members of the civil aviation community, incorporating
| airlines, airports, companies, organizations, associations,
| government agencies and qualified individuals, may register a
| domain name in .aero.
| smcl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think the joke is the inscarcity of tech groups that have
| chosen an aviation-themed .io domain to show off their
| venture.
| owlninja wrote:
| Is it supposed to be aviation themed though?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Yeah I'm not getting it either. Why is this interesting
| vs say "Airframes.tech" or "Airframes.aero"? And there
| are plenty of non-programming-related .io sites too.
| dewey wrote:
| "Airframes is an aircraft-related aggregation service"
| [deleted]
| core-utility wrote:
| A lot of tech (.e.g frameworks, etc.) tend to choose
| aviation themes for their naming
| tablespoon wrote:
| > A lot of tech (.e.g frameworks, etc.) tend to choose
| aviation themes for their naming
|
| Is it just aviation themes though? IIRC, it's pretty much
| any generic word with a positive connotation, with little
| care if that word has already been used for _another_
| unrelated framework.
| rektide wrote:
| 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/ , 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
| (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.h... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34520355
| kevinelliott wrote:
| Hey, I'm Kevin (founder of Airframes), and I'd like to give
| some background here.
|
| While the world has been obsessing about ADS-B, which is
| primarily focused on positional data, I've been building a
| platform that is heavily focused on ACARS (often referred to as
| Plain Old ACARS), VDL (the successor to ACARS), HFDL (HF-based,
| also containing ACARS payloads), and SATCOM (such as AoA -
| ACARS over Insmarsat, and AoI - ACARS over Iridium).
|
| The information in ACARS is quite interesting, and reveals
| significantly more about flights than ADS-B alone. The goal of
| the project has always been to provide a fuller picture of what
| is flying, including OOOI, routing, equipment status, fuel
| details, and more.
|
| Some very early feeders and enthusiasts have been feeding data
| and supporting the effort, and as many/most HN folks know, this
| is all very time consuming.
|
| Let me respond to your points too:
|
| 1. I'm a strong supporter of open source, and conceptually even
| open data. Your assessment that most of the stuff is still
| private is true. This is a strategic decision I have made.
| Having watched the aggregator space for many years now, my
| concern was that since we're still getting things built out
| (and I'm the only developer), a heavily budgeted competitor
| (such as FlightAware) could come along and enter the ACARS
| space long before we were ready and make the effort pointless.
|
| I do plan to continue to open source and open data, and as it
| makes sense to, at my own expense, I will do so. Especially as
| more people become involved and build interest in ACARS.
|
| 2. The roadmap on the trello has not been updated, because,
| there were very few people interested in the effort and did not
| really engage in using it. But there is most definitely a
| roadmap -- some of the things are related to API,
| desktop/mobile app, a radio-focused OS (initially aimed at
| making it easy to feed to Airframes and other aggregators, but
| with the goal of wider radio interests) similar to OctoPi for
| OctoPrint.
|
| 3. Documentation has been in the works. But, seeing as that I
| have a lot of priorities (and it's mostly just me at the
| moment), it's not complete. I was hoping to release it when
| more digestible/ready. https://docs.airframes.io
|
| 4. I would hope that folks do consider supporting the effort,
| and there are a lot of big plans for it in the ACARS space.
|
| Also, to put it bluntly, we were not yet ready for the events
| that unfolded. So there are some growing pains to deal with
| there.
| dx034 wrote:
| Also, why not support Opensky which has an academic background
| and is already well established?
| rektide wrote:
| 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
|
| [2] https://openskynetwork.github.io/opensky-
| api/rest.html#limit...
| xrayarx wrote:
| The difference is adsb exchange is for adsb data, this is for
| all kinds of data except adsb, so the game is who adds more
| data sources faster
| metaphor wrote:
| Is it just me or is the live message feed going ballistic?
| CSSer wrote:
| It's not just you.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It was probably fun and useful, the first week they built
| it. Is this an example of catastrophic success?
| kevinelliott wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Like https://www.airfleets.net/home/?
| cjrp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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), but we hope to keep at it.
| chinathrow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| But you will not get data access easily.
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(page generated 2023-01-26 23:02 UTC)