Collaborate Disseminate
The UK bank holiday weekend at the end of August is a national holiday in which it sometimes seems the entire country ups sticks and makes for somewhere with a …read more Continue reading How Three Letters Brought Down UK Air Traffic Control
Eurocontrol, the European air traffic control agency, has revealed that it has been under cyber attack for the last week, and says that pro-Russian hackers have claimed responsibility for the disruption.
When you first see the headline in the likes … Continue reading Pro-Russia hackers attack European air traffic control website, but don’t panic! Flights continue as normal
Plane spotting has been a hobby of aviation enthusiasts for generations. Hanging out by the airport, watching aircraft come and go, maybe even listening to Air Traffic Control on a …read more Continue reading It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s… A live Air Traffic Plane Spotting Simulation
Now that Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have sent their first full passenger flights into space, the US Federal Aviation Administration is demonstrating that it’s taking space tourism seriously. The agency has announced it is opening a new center in H… Continue reading US FAA expands air traffic control to include commercial space tourism
There appears to be no shortage of reasons to hate on wind farms. That’s especially the case if you live close by one, and as studies have shown, their general acceptance indeed grows with their distance. Whatever your favorite flavor of renewable energy might be, that’s at least something it …read more
Continue reading Wind Farms In The Night: On-Demand Warning Lights Are Coming
Yesterday Alphabet (formerly known as Google) announced that their Wing project is launching delivery services per drone in Finland, specifically in a part of Helsinki. This comes more than a month after starting a similar pilot program in North Canberra, Australia. The drone design Wing has opted for consists not …read more
In a 1999 movie (Pushing Tin), a flight controller is a passenger on a plane and tells the flight attendant that he needs to speak to the person controlling the plane. The flight attendant tells him the pilot is very busy to which the controller responds, “…you really think the pilot is controlling this plane? That would really scare me.” We wonder what that fictional character would think flying into Loveland Colorado. Their Colorado Remote Tower Project. While there’s still a human flight controller, they aren’t physically located at the airport and rely on remote cameras and radar so the …read more
Continue reading Pushing Tin Remotely: The Start of Flight Control in the Cloud
SpaceX just concluded 2017 by launching 10 Iridium NEXT satellites. A footnote on the launch was the “hosted payload” on board each of the satellites: a small box of equipment from Aireon. They will track every aircraft around the world in real-time, something that has been technically possible but nobody claimed they could do it economically until now.
Challenge one: avoid adding cost to aircraft. Instead of using expensive satcom or adding dedicated gear, Aireon listen to ADS-B equipment already installed as part of international air traffic control modernization. But since ADS-B was designed for aircraft-to-aircraft and aircraft-to-ground, Aireon had …read more
Continue reading Aireon Hitchhikes on Iridium to Track Airplanes
The commercial drone industry in the U.S. hasn’t heard much from the President Elect about his plans for rulemaking that will impact their business and global competitiveness. Last month, Associated Press broke the story that Trump is interested in privatizing air traffic control, wresting that responsibility from the Federal Aviation Administration, and handing it to a nonprofit… Read More Continue reading What the drone industry wants from the FAA and Trump