Technology That Makes Plane Tracking

John Moss Wathen IV is an aerospace engineer who studied the subject at Pennsylvania State University. One aspect of aviation that John Wathen IV studied in preparation for being a pilot is tracking planes by control towers and monitoring sites.

Until the past decade, tracking airplanes required the would-be tracker to go through the airport the plane took off from for flight data. The data was always slightly off as the airports had to rely on their instruments to detect the plane’s position. The newest system, called Automatic-Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast or ADS-B, gathers data directly from the plane.

The core of ADS-B technology is a transponder that relays information about the craft (location, altitude, and identification) at a high frequency back to the airport. The weakness of this system is that the high-frequency signal is easily blocked by the curvature of the Earth, meaning that planes need to fly higher to make sure the signal can reach its destination. Regardless, the information is more readily available now than ever in aviation history, allowing airports to be more precise with tracking their planes and for independent plane-tracking sites to gather data quickly and easily.