Evading the Public Eye: On Astroturfing in Open Aviation Data †

The usage of large private and business jets, from those owned by Elon Musk to Kylie Jenner and Bernard Arnault, has recently attracted considerable attention in many countries. Enabled by open and crowdsourced aircraft tracking systems based on the automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast protocol, the aircraft and their owners have been...

Environmental Footprint of Private and Business Jets †

Civil aviation contributes to rising global greenhouse gas emissions. Flights carried out by private and business jets are only a very small fraction of commercial passenger flights. However, these private flights are extremely environmentally inefficient and account for the most emissions per passenger in the aviation sector. While the...

Detecting and Measuring Turbulence from Mode S Surveillance Downlink Data

Instability in the movement of air masses in the atmosphere can result in turbulence. Most often, turbulence causes discomfort to passengers but it can occasionally affect their safety as well. Turbulence experienced by aircraft can be difficult to predict, especially for clear air turbulence (CAT) which occurs in the absence of any visual clues...

Detecting Events in Aircraft Trajectories: Rule-Based and Data-Driven Approaches

The large amount of aircraft trajectory data publicly available through open data sources like the OpenSky Network presents a wide range of possibilities for monitoring and post-operational analysis of air traffic performance. This contribution addresses the automatic identification of operational events associated with trajectories. This is a...