Monitoring the Skies

There are nearly 200,000 aircraft flights in the sky every single day. Keeping track of these flights is a costly and complicated effort. Government organizations (such as the Federal Aviation Administration in the USA) govern and implement standards and efforts to ensure that airlines operate in a safe and consistent manner. But, flight enthusiasts like you also keep watch.

This is done by using inexpensive computers and radio receivers (commonly knows as SDRs, or Software Defined Radios) all over the world that listen for communications between aircraft & ground stations, that then send that data to exchanges on the Internet.

The information sent to exchanges are then further decoded, correlated, and continually processed in order to display this information on maps, understand the conditions of the skies, or make discoveries about incidents that occur.