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.
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."