Flight tracking

We have been tracking planes using transponders with Mode S (mostly commercial aircraft) over the North of England using a Raspberry Pi. Each CSV file shows a single day and is approximately 160,000 rows of data.

Recorded data

• altitude(feet), latitude, longitude, date, time, angle, distance, squawk, ground_speed, track, callsign
  
  
• For example:
  4065A8,12100,53.37484,-1.67388,2017/02/11,00:00:00.287,170.63,25.32,5466,288,179,EXS014W
  
  
• There is a plane with transponder id 4065A8, at an altitude of 12,100 feet, overhead the A57 (snake road) on 11^th Feb 2017 at 11am, flying at an angle of 170 degrees, we've been tracking for 25 nautical miles, currently squarking 5466 on the transponder (air traffic controller use this ID to monitor the planes current details - note this may change as the plane travels over different locations eg Humberside, Leeds Bradford, Manchester Radar), travelling with a ground speed of 288 knots per hour, on a track of 179, with a call sign EXS014W (a Jet2 Boeing 737-3Q8QC which is 29 years old).

Further information

• Check out our blog which explains how we made the plane tracker on a Raspberry Pi and includes visualisations made from the data: http://insights.dataflock.co.uk/tracking-planes-using-a-raspberry-pi/