JANET FLIGHTS now Trackable on PlaneFinder

planefinder.net...

Just zoom in the Groom Lake area or Las Vegas area, and you will notice "WWW" callsigns.

Flightaware is good enough since that lets you see the whole flight plan, but what I like about this, is that this updates in real-time up to the second.

FlightAware seems to update data every 1 minute or so....

reply to post by darpa999


Dang! There's a lot of planes in the sky!
That's pretty cool-
Not sure how it helps me find out where the flying saucers are though-

gariac tracks this stuff pretty close. I'm sure he will be on this topic pretty soon!

reply to post by boomer135


Comment? Sure. Planefinder seems to have much wrong data.
US506 11:31AMPDT 08/24/2012
No way this plane was flying over the range. I have other examples of bugs as well,

Planefinder claims to use ADS-B. Here is their FAQ:
Planefinder FAQ
However, the Janet aircraft are not transmitting ADS-B. They have mode-s and that is about it. So I have to assume Planefinder has the FAA feed for aircraft that don't have ADS-B, and their program has bugs when using the feed.

Planefinder gets it's ADS-B in two manners. One is it scrapes data from PlanePlotter, apparently with permission. Planeplotter is a cluster-f**k of a high order. I have that piece of #e software, though I no longer run it due to it crashing. [It took me a while to find all the bugs. Avoid PlanePlotter at all costs.] The author refuses to fix it, nor will he give me back my money. Worse yet, the license is such that I can't even sell the program to someone else. Anyway, planeplotter has a "feature" where it interpolates the flight path of airplanes when it loses contact. Well interpolate is the wrong word. Anyone who knows a bit of math knows that you interpolate between data points. PlanePlotter extrapolates, so it loses the plane's ADS-B location and just guess at points where it would have gone. How do I know this? Easy, I watched a plane land via a mode-s receiver, and saw it kept flying on the stupid planeplotter program. You can turn this bug, I mean feature off, but there is no way to tell if the data sent to the PlanePlotter server came from mode-s boxes with the bug turned on. If I were Pinkfruit (company behind planefinder), I wouldn't use the planeplotter data..

Now the other way planefinder works is you can run a program they supply that reads the data from your mode-s receiver and feeds it to their network. Now that data should be good because Pinkfroott controls the gathering of the data. Essentially it gets the unfiltered feed right from the mode-s box. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell if the data on Planefinder is coming from PlanePlotter (#e) or Pinkfroot's custom software.

Here is Pinkfroot's commentary on how they get data:
Pinkfroot data

I have no idea what the business plan is for Planefinder, but they have actually bought mode-s receivers for some people to fill in the holes (as in coverage) in their network.

Note that when mode-s receivers first came on the market, they had a 5 minute delay on the data feed. The screen on your PC was real time, but the feed was delayed. It didn't take long for someone to do a hack to get around the delay. The manufacturers at that point figured why bother putting the delay in if it could be hacked, so the feeds are all real time. I don't know if Pinkfroot delays the data they send to to the internet.

Bottom line: Janets do not have ADS-B, so Planefinder is not displaying accurate positioning. You are better off looking at flightaware, flightwise, or similar websites. They show accurate tracking via the FAA feed until the feed is turned off by Nellis.

There are some options that might make planefinder less buggy. Go to "map options". In the map options popup window, click on the "map" tab. Check the box to the left of "disable flight estimation".

There is no way to select the FAA feed versus ADS-B data. However, the planes using ADS-B are red. The red matches the red used in the flight ID box. Planes from the FAA feed are orange. Yeah, you can hardly tell the difference between orange and red, at least in my setup.

If you want to hack a bit more, go back to the map tab and select "registration" rather than "flight ID". From what I can tell, the planes that fly under flight ID rather than registration show up as "z.NO REG" if the data is from the FAA feed.

I know that the Virgin America planes have ADS-B. At least that is the case from the planes I can see from my receiver. Planefinder has the Virgin America planes in red. I can get both the flight ID and the registration from planefinder.




If you look at the US506 flight over the NTTR, it was orange. The estimation was enabled then. That is probably why the flight location was so far off.

If you check the Janet flights Monday, I suspect the planes will be orange. That means the tracking is from the FAA feed and it should be no better than flightaware or flightwise.

There are a few military planes that routinely fly with ADS-B enabled. The E-6 Mercury for instance. Also some of the "C" planes. [C-32 I think.] It is possible you can catch military flights on planefinder.

If you uncheck (clear) the box next to "show scheduled flights", that will leave only ADS-B flights on the screen. Not exactly the best nomenclature for the option.

In plain English, the ADS-B flights should be the planes tracked from mode-s receivers, i.e. not using the FAA feed but viewing the plane position directly.

OK, proof positive that planefinder is simply the FAA feed that all the other tracking websites have, atleast as far as the Janets are concerned.

This is a shot of the NTTR area with "scheduled flights" enabled. The Janet aircraft are orange, indicating the data is not from ADS-B receivers.


Now a shot of the NTTR with "scheduled flights" disabled. Note the Janets are not there since they don't have ADS-B.


ADS-B is not mandatory in the US at the moment. I suspect when it becomes mandatory, Groom Lake, being of the privileged class of "not needing no stinkin' badges", will simply turn off ADS-B when over the range. Time will tell.

As far as planefinder goes regarding Janet flights, "nothing to see here folks, move along move along." I am not ruling out planefinder.net seeing the few military planes that use ADS-B. These military flights are not on the FAA feed.