Get Ready for Takeoff
May 4, ‘23
In late January, I heard on a podcast that Jetnet purchased ADSB Exchange, upsetting many people. I was unfamiliar with both companies but I was curious why would anyone be affected by it. My curiosity took me down a rabbit hole, what are ADSB Exchange and Jetnet and why are people upset about it?
ADS-B is a technology used in aviation that allows aircraft to broadcast their identity, position, altitude, and other information to ground stations and other aircraft. This reduces the risk of collisions and improves the overall safety and efficiency of air traffic management. These broadcast signals are sent over the air and anyone can setup a simple antenna and listen to them. ADS-B Exchange is a platform that receives and aggregates this data from enthusiasts and displays it on their website. Jetnet provides intelligence for the aviation industry, so it makes sense that they would be interested in this kind of data.
The problem
Aviation enthusiasts are gathering this data at their own costs and feeding it into ADS-B Exchange and its competitors for free. Although ADS-B Exchange was reportedly sold for $20 million, the community didn’t get anything in return. This turns out to be a systematic problem in this space, as bigger players than ADS-B Exchange (Flightaware and Flightradar24) also operate the same way, gather the data for free and sell it for profit.
As ADS-B is becoming mandatory in many countries (e.g. EU in 2017 and US in 2020) the value of the data collected increases and the recent acquisitions are proof of that. Apart from ADS-B Exchange, Flightaware was sold for an undisclosed sum to Raytheon Technologies in 2021 and Flightradar24 made a $20 million profit just last year.
All this is based on a community of enthusiasts running the receivers at their own expense, and receive nothing in return except for access to the platforms, which I found unfair.
The solution
Using the blockchain is an ideal solution to reward data providers in a fair and transparent manner. By providing incentives such as crypto rewards for the deployment of ADS-B receivers, we can obtain the largest coverage, which would be highly valuable in the market.
To illustrate, Flightradar24 currently has the biggest network of 30,000 receivers, while Helium, a well known Web3 project, has nearly a million receivers. We only need to convince 3% of Helium hosts to also collect ADS-B data to get the same coverage as Flightradar24
MVP
So we got to work and created wingbits.com
Initially, we developed an MVP to gain insight into what was required to collect and consolidate this data. You can see it live at https://wingbits.com/#map
Screenshot from wingbits.com
It proved to be a daunting challenge as ADS-B signals are transmitted by every aircraft at a minimum of one second intervals. As a result, if we want to access live data, we must manage an enormous amount of traffic. After experimenting with 5–6 different architectures, we eventually settled on one that we believe can manage the traffic effectively and scale in line with the project’s growth.
During our tests we ingested more than a 1 million data points in a single day from planes as far as 400km away using a single device! Even more impressive is that the median delay between a signal being received in the antenna to being saved to our database is 0.6s.
Requests/day from a single antenna
The coverage provided by a single antenna can be very large with up to 400km in the case of an outdoor antenna, and 50–100km in the case of an indoor one.
Alpha
Since our MVP yielded positive results, we’re feeling more confident than ever that we can make this happen. That’s why we’re excited to move the project into the Alpha stage, where we’ll test how well our network scales and consolidates the data.
We would like to add 100 new receivers to the network so if you would like to join this exciting new project from the very beginning, make sure to join our Discord and get on the waitlist by subscribing to our newsletter.
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