I had a read of Eastabrook’s blog recently (see a link in the Blogroll) and noticed that he posted about an interesting link that he found. The link, entitled Flight Tracking in 3D, shows details of a few downloads that you can grab for Google Earth which actually show the current locations of flights that are currently in progress all over the world!!!
Unbelievable. Pretty amazing technology, and at the same time quite scary. What kind of possible security issues does this feature open up? I know that Google Earth has had these kinds of questions asked in the past, but this to me seems like it’s taking the issue to a whole new level.
October 5, 2006
Given that flight schedules are public domain, it’s hardly a security risk…
October 6, 2006
Flight schedules are, but the current location of the plan during the course of it’s flight is a bit different
October 9, 2006
Well, considering that the course of it’s flight is “also” public domain it seems, there’s still hardly a security risk especially given the lag time realistically speaking. If I were planning a…erm…”covert operation”, I reckon my funding would have to be sufficient to give me coordinates from say…a satelite or AWACKS data at the very least. I doubt I’d be hedging my bets (or my heat seeking ballistic missile for that matter) on a feed from Google Earth
October 9, 2006
Terrorism doesn’t necessarily target “covert ops”. Anyways, it’s not really a biggie
I don’t think it’s a huge issue, but I think this is the start of something which could possibly cause issues down the track. Wait for the day when someone blames this kind of facility for causing some form of disaster.
November 12, 2006
the feed is delayed by 5 mins if I remember correctly. I don’t think the software simulates the positions of the flights as per the logged flight plan, I believe it shows the “actualy positions”, so even if the flight was delayed due to head wind, Google Earth reflects that, all-but five minutes later. Cool stuff though.
Chrs
P.