Flight Blender

Flight Blender is two things:

• a flight feed aggregator that has different modules that can process and relay data around flights and airspace: geo-fence, flight declarations, air-traffic data
• an open source Remote ID "display provider" compatible with ASTM Remote ID standard

There are different modules that enable this:

• Flight Tracking: It takes in flight tracking feeds from various sources e.g. ADS-B, live telemetry and others and outputs as a single fused JSON feed and submits it to a Display Application e.g. Flight Spotlight to be shown in real-time on a display
• Geofence: A Geofence can be submitted into Flight Blender and consequently transmitted to Spotlight
• Flight Declaration: Future flights up-to 24 hours can be submitted, this does not use the USS <-> USS API but is a standalone component, for supported DSS commands see below
• DSS Connectivity: There are modules to connect and read for e.g. Remote ID data from a DSS

First steps / Get Started

Normally a "Display Provider" is used in conjunction with a "Display Application". In this case Flight Blender output is directed to a Flight Spotlight instance. You can customize a application instance by choosing what kind of modules you want to support, you can pick any or all from the above.

System Diagram

The diagram below shows how Fight Blender works.

Installation

Docker and Docker Compose files are available for this software. You can first clone this repository using git clone https://www.github.com/openskies-sh/flight-blender.git and then go to the directory and use docker-compose up command.

This will open up port 8080 and you can post air-traffic data to http://localhost:8080/set_air_traffic and then start the processing.

Technical details

• To begin, review the API Specification to understand the endpoints and the kind of data that you can set in Flight Blender.
• Then take a look at some data formats: Flight tracking data. This file follows the format as specified in the Air-traffic data protocol

Submitting AOI, Flight Declarations and Geofence data

Take a look at sample data below to see the kind of data that can be submitted in Flight Blender

• Area of Interest as a GeoJSON
• Geofence as a GeoJSON, we have converters to convert from ED-269
• Flight Declaration. This file follows the format specified in Flight Declaration Protocol

Image Credit

Blender Vectors by Vecteezy