How do you track a plane?

Re:How do you track a plane? by trauco on Sunday March 16, 2014 @10:49PM (#7412609)

I do not know how much bandwidth you would need to track the entire fleet of all major airlines (even if you, say, limited yourself to international and/or flights longer than X hours/km), but worldwide tracking of automated instrumentation (I'm an earth scientist) is done regularly. A few examples:

- The iridium satellite network, which provides phone service, also provides a Short Burst Data service, which I suspect could be used for this purpose.

- The Argo network tracks thousands of ocean drifters (http://www.argos-system.org/?nocache=0.9626778103411198). Some of those drifters are using the Iridium network now.

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Re:How do you track a plane? by Perdition on Monday March 17, 2014 @02:13AM (#7413431)

I didn't say it can't be done, I said the people arguing for real time satellite tracking haven't even examined whether it is feasible.

Iridium only has ~8Mhz of bandwidth, that is fine for a sensor platform that probably only transmits a couple of times a day, but could quickly run into trouble with constant positional updates from thousands of planes (especially with streaming of cockpit data recorders, as has been argued for as well). And the saturation of the Iridium network is not something that can be controlled without extensive re-engineering to enable QOS.

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