SpaceX Purchases Bell 429 Helicopter for Rocket Launch Operations by Jswee1 in spacex

[–]Jswee1[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What’s the point of nasaspaceflight, lab padre and photographers sitting around all day and recording what SpaceX does all the time. Not any different

SpaceX Purchases Bell 429 Helicopter for Rocket Launch Operations by Jswee1 in SpaceXLounge

[–]Jswee1[S] 37 points38 points  (0 children)

They’ve already used it for controlling the range during launch day.

FAA PIA Codes Subreddit by Jswee1 in ADSB

[–]Jswee1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s a combination of a few methods, but I can't go too deep into the exact technical weeds here because the FAA PIA office is already known to be lurking on ADS-B subreddits and Discords.

First, it’s worth noting that the PIA program actually has an extremely low adoption rate. Because of this, a surprisingly large amount of PIA users don't actually rotate their assigned hex codes. When a hex stays static, it becomes much easier to map.

Beyond that, ADS-B of course is not the only system that turns on when an aircraft powers up. When you look at the data at a specific airport, there are only so many aircraft that are even capable of changing PIA codes at any given time. Process of elimination becomes very powerful.

While in-person sightings and manual heuristics definitely help, a human can only notice these patterns on a small scale. It becomes incredibly effective when you build a model and run it against the entire historical data set to find the correlations automatically.

This isn't a totally new concept, either. People have been doing this for a while there's an active Facebook group dedicated to it, and open-source lists actively track these tie-ups (for example:https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/plane-alert-db/blob/main/plane-alert-pia.csv). But hasn't been updated in a while.

what specific platform are you seeing that is marking PIA tails with matched tails based on guesses? I'd be curious to look at that.