True in the aviation world. I've noticed that most people under, say, 50 or so, like ADS-B (airplanes broadcasting their location) for the safety reasons. But most of the pilots over 50 will say "It's just the government coming up with another way to track you."
In fact I wonder if it's even a licensed pilot—William Bushling apparently flew for 20 years without a current FAA license and also didn't use ADS-B; when he finally lost the dice game it took them days to find the wreckage: https://youtu.be/69NvK6YbNtg
Other sites like https://globe.adsbexchange.com or https://globe.adsb.fi don't filter aircrafts, they even show military planes (well, if they have ADS-B enabled). Though they don't have coverage above oceans, as satellite ads-b is expensive. (These sites look nearly the same, as they both use tar1090 as the webui, but they may have different coverage)
These sites, may sometimes have less coverage, as the sites you mentioned are way more popular. But if your area has coverage by these sites, you can be sure that you'll see every plane if it has ADS-B.
You could even replay, if you know the time and date when the plane passed, by appending ?replay to the URL.
A 30usd rtl-sdr dongle is enough to receive local ads-b signals, if one wants to test it.
(The fields are San Martin and Watsonville in the Bay Area, FWIW.)
I don't understand the impetus to allow someone to fly a massive, deadly hunk of metal over a community without clarifying their telemetry to that community.
I think it's an act of wanton corruption that law enforcement is now exempt from this requirement in some situations.
You could argue it's not a very good one, but it does exist:
"This rulemaking provides an exception to ADS–B requirements, removing the transmission requirement for sensitive operations conducted by Federal, State and local government entities in matters of national defense, homeland security, intelligence and law enforcement."
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-07-18/pdf/2019-1...
I think it's wrong that the government exempts themselves from it if they're going to require it of everyone else, but that's so far down my list of grievances with the government it's barely worth thinking about :)
The point I am trying to make: most of things flying seem more dangerous (higher speed, higher reach, different fuel) than cars.
And yet somehow flying is safer than driving! As a sibling comment mentions, a lot of that has to do with all of the safety controls in place.
My point is that driving at modern speeds in modern vehicles is actually pretty dangerous, even if not as dangerous as aviation, and yet we as a society exercise very little oversight over the activity.
There are good reasons to not have "ADS-B for cars", mostly related to privacy. Unlike flying, many people heavily rely on cars to carry out their day-to-day activities. But I think it's at least worth thinking about.
Hanging around FBOs/flight lines/bars with pilots that also ride, it's come down to this:
After countless attempts and arguments while trying to normalize accident/fatal accident rates by converting hours flown/miles ridden, statistics do support that GA does seem to be a bit more dangerous than riding.
That having been said, my opinion is that most of the GA risks are in the hands of the pilot, while most of the risks of riding are external to the rider. Most of the worst motorcycle accidents I've seen or heard of involved the rider getting schwacked by a car or truck, while most of the worst GA accidents involved the pilot schwacking him or herself with poor judgement and/or skills that are below MIF. I put a lot of effort into minimizing pilot-induced risk when I fly, so scientifically speaking and all, I -feel- safer when flying than riding, and probably am.
I believe that plenty of people would object to that level of tracking citing privacy reasons.
(I'm not against ADS-B myself.)
But I do think there's a difference in risk. Aviation has a pretty dang good record, and I think that the tradition of transparency in comms and telemetry is a huge part of that.
While this is true about commercial airliners it is not true for general aviation. The safety of general aviation is roughly comparable to motorbikes.
> I think it's an act of wanton corruption that law enforcement is now exempt from this requirement in some situations.
For more than a decade I worked airborne geophysical surveying - hundred thousand to a million+ line kilometre grid draping at 80m ground clearance on routes planned in advance.
The planes ran stable known instrument configurations and were calibrated weekly to measure their individual magnetic and radiometric signature.
Aircraft positioning signals on long haul flights Australia -> India -> Fiji -> Mali weren't an issue.
Extraneous non required signalling during grid surveying was an issue.
A reasonable comprimise was to blip a quick position fix at the end of every fourth or fifth 20 kilometre line run (say) ... otherwise no broadcasts during instrument recording times .. and glow in the dark divers watches for the pilots or random chunks of metal casing there one day and gone the next.
Not wrong, but the tracking is to help with reducing collisions.
That said:
* https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy
You need to go with 1090ES(-only), and not the 'consumer focused' UAT, though.
guess there is the corruption issue?
- Fisheries may not (historically or present day) be a huge part of their economy, and has therefore been neglected for years.
- Not enough infrastructure due to economic neglect.
- Huge revolving door of officials. One month you deal with one person, six months its another one. You don't know if they are real professionals, or someone placed there (party stooge, nepotism, you name it).
- No cooperation between fisheries/marine agencies, and navy/police/coastal guard.
- And, yes, some corruption I'd assume.
I have a concrete example:
We were invited to a developing country to assess their systems, and consult them on how to move forward. They were/are losing millions and millions due to illegal trawling.
Arrive at the HQ, which was a run down office where a handful of people were working. All data was shared via excel spreadsheets, no real systems to work on, lots of paper forms that someone had to digitize. Someone looking at MarineTraffic from time to time.
That's the state of some of these countries.
The illegal fishers are long out of their EEZ before anyone can react.
This can be very efficient if you spot check people from time to time, and simply cut the hands off of anyone found to be violating the law.
Tell people to calculate and pay their own taxes too, with the same punishment if they falsify stuff.
That's how Afghanistan dealt with opium farmers before 2001, and it was amazingly effective.
however, one (of many) problems is that the poachers make more money than the employed bureaucrats .. step 2 - follow the money
There are EU regulations requiring fishing vessels over 15m to use AIS (the UK also abides by these) so within Europe the standards are reasonably consistent. Regulations are considerably more relaxed or less effectively enforced in other jurisdictions which is reflected in the data; it's possible the 98% of all fishing vessels operating off Thailand without AIS are all legal. But given the reputation of larger vessels operating in that region for slavery, perhaps not.
Agree there are privacy-related reasons why you might ideally not want competing vessels seeing which waters you fish, but AIS alone doesn't tell anyone whether it's any better than other waters (and fishermen have no shortage of other data points to plan their activity or other boats to follow if they really don't have any better heuristics). Regulatory evasion is rife even in effectively-regulated areas not least because the industry is convinced some of the regulations are actually wrong, especially when it comes to localised quotas. You knows there's an issue when a former operator of a commercial fleet in Europe tells you candidly, that their skippers (who are all tracked by AIS/VMS) would definitely expect any catch logging system to allow them to lie about which points on their voyage yielded most of the fish....
Ya, they are called spy sats. For the better part of a century, very smart people have been funded by people with very deep pockets to track ships at sea that don't want to be tracked. If anyone thinks their startup sat company is going to start tracking ships with passive radar, they are entering a very very mature field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacrosse_(satellite)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ocean_Surveillance_Syste...
>> The Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS) is a series of signals-intelligence satellites that have conducted electronic signals intelligence for the U.S. Navy since the early 1970s.[1] The first series of satellites were codenamed "White Cloud" or "PARCAE", while second- and third-generation satellites have used the codenames "Ranger" and "Intruder".
And for anyone saying "well, our sats are going to be in lower orbit" ... that has been done too. If you ever read about satellites powered by nuclear reactors, those were low-orbit radar sats looking for ships.
But, as someone who's working on exactly that, it is not easy - and there's a lot of red tape to wade through. The data gets filtered by the military, and then you get whatever scraps are left. Scans/passes of areas with too much military activity tend to be off-limits.
A big threat is that people could start to fingerprint radar signatures, which in turn isn't ideal if you're a, say, navy or intelligence ship.
Not that your adversaries (read: China, Russia, etc.) probably don't have that exact type of data, but it's just standard practice to minimize exposure.
Yeah but as long as no one dares to stand up to the worst offenders - particularly China, who have been under fire for years from their neighborhood in the Philippines [3] all the way to Africa [1][2] - with actual navies to stop and either seize or sink non-compliant ships all of this will be in vain.
The open sea is the last remaining place on Earth where darwinism in its purest form still rules. Might makes right...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people...
[2] https://www.voanews.com/a/fishy-business-report-details-chin...
[3] https://apnews.com/article/china-canada-philippines-illegal-...
Luckily I have other safety systems in place but damn is that a buzz kill at 3am on a new moon night.
Also another reason you would turn off AIS is if you are hauling precious cargo and don’t want pirates to know your whereabouts. I know this sounds cliche but it’s true. Cargo vessels traveling near pirate activity will often “go dark” to avoid detection and dealing with a Capt. Phillips situation.
So yeah, it’s difficult to get a fix on just how many vessels are out there, big or small. I’ve seen a lot of weird designs and contraptions out at sea.
First off, a big reason as to why - is because the laws differ from country to country. Some countries, like Norway for example, require shipping vessels over a certain length to broadcast their positions through AIS, VMS.
This may not be the case for, say, UK.
There are arguments to be had from both systems as to WHY you wouldn't want to broadcast your positions at all times - a typical one is that other could easily infer your fishing fields (fishing patterns are trivial, if you've worked with this you can easily spot what tools they are fishing with, and likely what species they are going for - don't need ML-based systems for that. Any fisher or fisheries analyst can spot the patterns), and thus go after that.
The other is privacy.
A very typical thing is that ships turn off their AIS as soon as they enter international waters. There is no enforcement of that, and many developed countries have practically zero resources to fight illegal fishing, from a technological point of view. UNDP has a program which is aimed at helping developing countries with the tech and training to detect illegal fishing, but there's a long way to go. Developing countries desperately need the data, which is either owned by governments, or private actors. AIS data is either picked up by satellites, or base stations. VMS systems are expensive, but also allow for ships to transfer catch reports and similar - but is unfortunately not always enforced in a good way.
But tech is becoming better. Satellites with NAV/marine radar detectors are in orbit. Long-range drones with sensors are a thing. Countries are hammering through laws that force ships to have certain sensors on them. Lots of ML-assisted tools for automating detection and analysis is being introduced and used.