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by jjwiseman 979 days ago
Hello, HN. I made this site. Link to previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245346

I'm curious about HN's take on a couple things:

1. Why haven't FlightRadar24, FlightAware, or any of the other flight trackers done this? Not enough people actually interested? I know there are companies that use GPSJAM to help brief their pilots.

2. Monetization! I can't really justify spending more time to work on projects like this one when they don't make money, and do cost (a little) money. But I absolutely do not want to turn these projects into another another job--I don't want contracts, obligations, deadlines. Do I try to get (very niche, but I bet they exist) advertisers to cover site costs and some of my time? Do I crowdfund for general development? Let me know your thoughts. And this isn't just for GPSJAM; I have other projects. For example...

A couple other aviation related projects I've done recently:

1. The Global Aircraft Event Viewer: https://aircraft.social/events/ A near real-time map of higher level aircraft behaviors around planet Earth: Circling, "near misses" (RAs), takeoffs, landings, emergency squawks, and other stuff. A very early experiment, but I think it's kind of neat (especially the RAs!).

2. Closest Points of Approach: https://skycircl.es/cpa/ An analysis tool for checking to see just how close two (or more) aircraft got. For example, if you saw the New York Times Story "How a Series of Air Traffic Control Lapses Nearly Killed 131 People"[1], here's a link that visualizes and animates the scenario that happened in Austin, where a Fedex jet almost landed on a Southwest passenger jet: http://skycircl.es/cpa/?kmlurl=https://gist.githubuserconten... My tool estimates they got within about 150 feet (assuming idealized point aircraft without volume!)–The NTSB said they got "within 200 feet".

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/business/air-traffic-cont...

2 comments

Would you be interested in handing it off to a maintainer owning it in a 501c3 as a public good? If not, do you want to continue to run it as a non profit public good with donations? I am willing to donate, just curious what the costs look like, and am a huge fan of projects like this (sensor networks/fabrics).
How do you know that a RA has happened? You infer it from the flight paths?

Also, I'd just add ads and some recurrent donations and see how it goes - it looks to me that you're the perfect person to run projects like these. It would make no sense if money was the only problem that stops you.