Traffic fan or not, flight tracking sites show sky is full of stories
It used to be that nobody wanted to live by waterways. Often polluted and sometimes conveying industrial freight, developers usually gave the area’s rivers and streams a cold shoulder, facing buildings away from ugly barges and unsavory smells.
But over the last few decades as efforts were made to clean up urban waterways, they turned from necessary nuisances into desirable attractions. Instead of blemished industrial land, they became sought-after waterfront properties in many areas. Riverwalk attractions were developed in places like Naperville, Aurora and downtown Chicago.
Even hardworking blue collar waterways like the Cal Sag Channel are now seen as assets for commercial and residential development. And the river traffic that ply those waters have started to draw positive attention. Social media fan pages that have sprouted up focusing on inland water freight have thousands of followers who share videos of boats, ships and the bellowing sound of “captain’s salutes.”
Though the Chicago area was born on the back of river traffic — the Illinois and Michigan Canal linking the Great Lakes to the
Mississippi River was a key factor in the city’s rise to prominence — it’s no longer the primary conveyance around here.
Still, we live at a worldwide nexus of transportation, so it’s no wonder that some of us have become fans of transit modes. That’s reflected even in the suburbs.
A small park in Homewood was established just to accommodate railroad fans and events such as Driving the Dixie celebrate our motorcar heritage. Like water freight, those transportation modes each have legions of devoted enthusiasts.
Another transportation mode is much easier to spot from just about
everywhere, and maybe that’s why it’s becoming more popular. Plane spotting is as easy as looking up. It’s like bird-watching, but simpler as most air traffic doesn’t try to hide from people.
My friend Sean Pender has long been a transportation fan, particularly of air traffic. When our group of friends was younger and we thought we were cool, we’d poke gentle fun at him for his unabashed enthusiasm about trains and planes, because that stuff wasn’t cool.
He didn’t care, and has remained a fan for years. In the 1990s, he used to bring his young son to a more approachable Midway Airport to watch planes take off from near the end of the runway, and as technology advanced, he went along with it. Now he’s an airplane tracking aficionado, using a website and app to find out what exactly is flying overhead, where it came from and where it’s going.
“It’s gotten better over the years,” he said. “It’s mostly curiosity. You look up and you’re like, ‘I want to find out where this plane is going.’ And once you find out these aircraft going over your house are coming from Europe, it’s amazing.”
Like bird-watchers, he’ll grab his binoculars when he has the chance, to get a closer look.
“It’s always cool to see the different paint schemes,” Pender said. “The airlines are now painting all their planes different. United (Airlines) has a Star Wars airplane, and ANA from Japan has one that looks like a droid from Star Wars.”
He’s got an eye to the sky when he’s at his home in Chicago Heights and when he’s driving around for work.
“Yesterday I was in Calumet City and saw an Air Force transport plane,” Pender said. “It’s amazing to me. I’ll be sitting in my front room and see on the radar a plane coming up from Atlanta going to Minneapolis, and the radar shows it’s over Michigan City (Indiana), but I can see it clearly. Another time I was in Schaumburg and saw a huge one. It was a Lufthansa going from Houston back to Paris. I looked on the map and it was over Ottawa (Illinois), but I could totally see it.”
That enthusiasm is becoming more rampant, perhaps as a result of people looking for distractions amid the pandemic.
Dan Streufert, a Mount Prospect native who graduated from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, developed the flight tracking website ADS-B Exchange a few years ago as the Federal Aviation Administration was shifting from radar-based operations to a self-reporting system for aircraft called automatic dependent surveillance — broadcast.
It’s a system that allows for “real-time precision and shared situational awareness” for pilots and air traffic controllers alike, and relies on aircraft broadcasting their exact position through a transponder.
It also allows anyone with the right receiver to see that information, and Streufert wrote software that lets a network of observers compile the information on a real-time map. It shows the position of everything in the air from ultralight aircraft to international flights to Air Force One.
“I put the word out and people started sending their data in, and now we have over 7,000 different receivers all over the world sending their data in,” he said.
That data is shared at https://globe.adsbexchange.com, which Streufert said attracts 50,000 to 60,000 users every day to check out what’s going on overhead.
“I run a website that creates its own content,” he said. “It’s always new.”
He said while flight tracking as a hobby is gaining interest in the United States, “it’s much more popular in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.”
“They’re very into it,” he said. “There are lots of people feeding into it from over there.”
And it’s attracted the attention of powerful people, as well. Streufert said he’s gotten certified mail from attorneys in Moscow, where “really rich Russian guys don’t want people to see where their jets are going.”
“Chinese state media accused us of conducting espionage,” he said. “We’re not, but people there put up receivers.
“We don’t unlist anyone. Nothing here is illegal. If your plane is broadcasting, we’re going to show it.”
The FAA, however, has a program that allows people to enlist their aircraft, but sometimes that can backfire.
“The other day I saw three planes trailing each other over Colorado,” he said. “They’re flying at 40,000 feet and squawking these blocked codes, and I thought ‘what is this?’ ”
He mentioned the mysterious planes on
Twitter, and soon “a bunch of people got involved, eventually even finding the aircraft after they landed at a private airfield that happened to have a public webcam functioning.
“It turned out it was a group of executives from a Fortune 20 health insurance firm taking an executive outing to Pebble Beach and Monterrey,” Streufert said. “I think they wanted to stay under the radar, but they weren’t under the radar on that one. … But if they hadn’t used this blocking service, it’s likely nobody would have really noticed.”
Another user set up a an automatic account to issue tweets whenever a jet registered to billionaire Elon Musk is in the air.
“There’s always something interesting you can pick up and go down a rabbit hole with,” Streufert said.
He has commercial users for the data as well, such as airport supply companies gauging air traffic congestion and timing, that help pay overhead such as the huge server load the site requires.
For me, though, it’s fun to find out what’s overhead, whether it’s a jumbo jet carrying people internationally, a smaller corporate jet registered to a megachurch or corporation or the Chicago police helicopter patrolling the Dan Ryan expressway or circling somewhere in pursuit of a suspect.
The sky is full of stories, it turns out, and it’s hard not to be a fan of that.