Every airliner above 18,000 feet broadcasts its own GPS position once a second on 1090 MHz, unencrypted and unauthenticated, and a thirty- dollar dongle is enough to receive it. We walk what ADS-B actually is on the wire, why hobbyists ended up running the world's biggest flight-tracking network, how FlightAware and Flightradar24 fuse the feeds, and the honest privacy and security implications of broadcasting every plane's position in clear.
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ADS-B and Tracking Every Plane in the Sky -
Air Traffic Control Air traffic control is the largest distributed safety-critical coordination system on the planet, routing tens of thousands of flights a day across borders and oceans without losing any of them. We walk the en-route, terminal, and oceanic control structure, radar versus ADS-B surveillance, the controller-pilot loop, and why "free flight" never quite arrived.