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Flight-tracking provider FlightAware has added helicopters to its global flight-tracking service. Dubbed Global for Helicopters (GFH), the new service launched on Monday at NBAA-BACE offers tracking capabilities similar to those provided by the company's FlightAware Global product for airplanes but with features targeting the unique needs of helicopter operators.
“Our mission is being the provider of the stories of flight,” said FlightAware president and general manager Matt Davis. “We want to tell the stories of flight in airspace on a global basis. We’ve been focused on fixed-wing historically…[but] helicopters are flights and we want to be telling those stories as well.”
While FlightAware tracks aircraft with its own network of ground-based ADS-B receivers, hosted by individuals and companies all over the world, these aren’t always ideally situated to capturing helicopter movements. “It’s a bit different than the fixed-wing story,” Davis said.
Business jets take off from well-established runways, where helicopters can operate from nearly anywhere and often not from airports. Tracking helicopters is a more complex technological challenge, and FlightAware has made new investments to offer that service to helicopter operators who want to monitor their rotorcraft.
“There are other helicopter flight-tracking solutions,” Davis acknowledged, but these can be expensive, requiring installations of special onboard hardware and some sort of satellite communication capability.
To keep costs more reasonable and eliminate the need for onboard equipment, he said, “We’re using Aireon space-based ADS-B as a supplemental data source to power our [GFH] product.”
Aireon’s network is enabled by ADS-B receivers hosted on Iridium’s Next satellite constellation, and these receivers can detect ADS-B transmissions from aircraft where ground-based receivers are not available, including over oceans. For helicopter tracking, Aireon can “see” aircraft equipped with 1090-MHz transponders even at low altitudes, in mountainous areas, and behind buildings.
“We’re taking that technology and moving it into the helicopter market,” Davis said. “With [GFH] leveraging ADS-B technology, it makes it easy, and there’s nothing the operator has to do to start tracking their helicopters.”
“We realized we needed to make some technology evolutions to be able to track helicopters the way we want,” said senior product manager James Parkman. “In the past, we’ve had some difficulty distinguishing between helipads and runways.”
To bolster the experience for helicopter operators, FlightAware made improvements to its HyperFeed engine, which combines data from a variety of sources, including terrestrial and satellite ADS-B. “HyperFeed combines those and makes intelligent decisions based on the information it’s receiving and uses the best information for the most accurate flight picture,” he said.
“For helicopters, we had to tweak a good amount of logic to account for their characteristics,” Parkman added. “Aireon is key. Helicopter operators have been a little less trustful of ADS-B tracking because of difficulties with accuracy. The satellite solution does improve that greatly, with Aireon implementing a more granular, higher data feed.”
The result is much-improved position reporting, which used to be every minute or so and now is fewer than every 10 seconds. “This is much better for tracking helicopters with their more unusual flying patterns,” he said. Another data source that FlightAware has added is Spidertracks.
To address the challenge of tracking where helicopters land, FlightAware created a custom airports feature, which lets customers define their own helipads. This lets HyperFeed treat these locations as helicopter departure or arrival airports so it can include them in ETA calculations, Parkman explained, “rather than in the past where it said it’s close to this airport or city because it didn’t have a specific location in our database. This allows customers to define the polygons that they can enter, exit, and be alerted on.”
A firefighting crew, for example, could define an area—polygon—for alerting the base as to a helicopter’s location.
Other features available with GFH are similar to those in FlightAware’s Global premium tracking product, including live surface movement tracking, predictive ETAs, alerting, FBO coordination, premium weather layers, and the ability to view an entire fleet on a map.
The new GFH service costs $3,600 per aircraft annually for tracking helicopters with 1090-MHz transponders. FlightAware can also track helicopters with 978-MHz ADS-B Out, but this service level doesn’t include the Aireon tracking.