Flight radar

Fetches ADS-B flight data from radar servers (ModeSMixer2 or Virtual Radar Server) and presents a chronological view of past flights with an interactive live map of position reports.

Impressions

Ovierview of past flights

Flight path visualization

Prerequisites

1. Make sure you have Python 3 installed,
2. Install the dependencies package with pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

The application can either be configured by enviroment variables or by a config file

Config file

1. Copy the config.json from contrib/samples to the project root
2. Configure host/port of your radar server
3. Set the path to your data folder. It must contain BaseStation.sqb (not included, get it here) and mil_ranges.csv. Example "dataFolder" : "/path/to/installation/resources/",
4. Chose whether you want to track military planes only

Enviroment variables

See section below for details

• DATA_FOLDER
• SERVICE_URL
• SERVICE_TYPE
• MIL_ONLY
• DB_RETENTION_MIN
• UNKNOWN_AIRCRAFT_CRAWLING

Config options

Option name	Optional	Default value	Description
serviceUrl	no		The url to your radar service
type	yes	vrs	The type of your radar service, eithr vrs for VirtualRadarServer, mm2 for ModeSMixer2 or dmp1090 for dump1090
dataFolder	yes	resources	the absolute path to your resources folder
militaryOnly	yes	false	Whether everything other than military planes should be filtered (true or false)
deleteAfterMinutes	yes	1440	Determines how many minutes after the last signal was received should the the flight in the dababase be retained before it's deleted. Set to 0 to keep entries indefinitely
logging	yes		syslogHost The host to send logs to syslogFormat The syslog log format logLevel [optional] Log level, See here for more infos logToConsole [optional] If true, logs are logged to syslog and to console, if false only to syslog
crawlUnknownAircraft	yes	false	If true, aircraft not found in BaseStation.sqb will be looked up in various data sources in the web. Since this method uses crawling which might now always be allowed. Beware: This could potentially lead to blockage of your IP address
googleMapsApiKey	no		The map view needs an API key to render the map. You can get one here.

Running Flightradar

Initializing the database

flightradar uses an Sqlite3 database (resources/flights.sqlite) to store flight information. You have to create and initialize the database with its schema first. When building a docker image, the database is initialized upon build time.

Initialize schema:

export FLASK_APP=flightradar.py
flask initschema

Starting the application

Running it with the debug webserver (Not recommended for productive use). Don't forget to initialize the db (see abve) before the first run

export FLASK_APP=flightradar.py
flask run

Runnig it with WSGI (productive setup) (binds to all interfaces on port 8083)

gunicorn flightradar:app --bind 0.0.0.0:8083

Using Windows

When running the application on Windows, consider the following:

• Use SET instead of export when using Windows

Known issues

• Performance may suffer if you have a lot of flights in your database. There's a lot of potential for improvement in the persistence layer.
• If you're running it in a Docker container, the flight db runs in the same container. Adding the possibility to externalize it might be a good idea