May be you will remember an earlier post in which we were querying why the Sesar JU wants to spend a bunch of money on test flights and other fun to find a way of tracking aircraft over the ocean. And this as a result of the tragic Air France accident earlier this year.
At the time we said that asking any good flight tracking company, like AirNav Systems would give them all the information they need instead of an expensive study, probably free… Afterwards the cost would only be the equipment that would need to go on some aircraft plus the fees to the company selected. But spending more than 30K up front is totally unnecessary.
Have a look at this picture. Traffic over the North Atlantic on a Thursday afternoon, updated every 45 seconds… The data field at the top show that it is an Alitalia flight, on the right hand side speed, heading, times… No, this is not what you get for 30K+… This is what you can have on your PC right now for a few bucks a month.
Zoom in and you get flight data displayed alongside the position symbols. Just like labels on radar. Even the simplest version of the software is able to track selected flights…
Still not convinced?