back to article Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

An airliner that appeared to crash into the North Sea earlier this week in fact landed safely. Yet multiple flight tracker websites showed it spiralling into the ocean. Experts have explained to The Register what really happened. It began when Reg reader Ross noticed that a flight scheduled to land at Aberdeen on Tuesday 15 …

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  1. mr.K

    Grandma on a flight?

    Grandma on a flight? What kind of pre-covid19 madness is this?

  2. Dvon of Edzore
    Headmaster

    Authenticity v. Accuracy

    The Fine Article mentions: <<Open-source bod Watkins sighed: "All of these systems were developed with the idea everyone wanted everyone else to have accurate data, for safety, and there are few checks and balances in place to validate the authenticity of the data.">>

    Watkins may have been addressing GPS Spoofing, but the story here seems the opposite. The flight data was authentic, i.e. coming from the aircraft in question, but not accurate, as some of the aircraft systems did not know where they were to a shockingly large degree. (And the first Redmond-trained minion who says "They were in an aeroplane" gets to repeat the feather-versus-anvil speed of gravity test from 20 kilometres AGL. Their choice of which to hold on the way down in lieu of parachute.)

    1. heyrick Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Authenticity v. Accuracy

      Anvil, because I want to make an impact.

      1. Martin
        Happy

        Re: Authenticity v. Accuracy

        Trust me, you'll make a pretty good impact even if you're holding the feather.

  3. Danny 2

    Qinetic

    Qinetic West Freugh?

    I went for a job interview at Serco Kyle of Lochalsh, early nineties. It soon became Qinetic to further enrich Tories. It was to test missiles and torpedoes on Benbecula, 10 weeks on and 7 weeks off.

    I drove into the factory in my girlfriend's Fiat Panda which had Greenpeace stickers on it, causing quite a commotion among the security guards. They could have just put the guard rail down.

    The thrust of my interview was why I had the terrorist group Greenpeace stickers on my car. I explained it wasn't my car or stickers, and anyway Greenpeace were hardly terrorists compared to the French government who had just sunk their Rainbow Warrior ship in New Zealand.

    To their credit they offered me the job. To my credit I refused it.

    I wouldn't trust Serco or Qinetic employees with a long dirty pole.

    1. stiine Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Qinetic

      I thought that was one of the better French actions of the last 40 years.

  4. SkippyBing

    Odd

    I thought ADS-B data had to come from a GPS source with Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) so IRS drift shouldn't effect the position reported over it.

  5. Steve 39

    FilghtAware has a little more track

    FlightAware have a little bit more of the track than FlightRadar, including it turning round very sharply at the point FlightRadar ends

    https://flightaware.com/live/flight/ENZ212P/history/20200915/1446Z/EGMC/L%2056.50929%20-2.33118

    They also list an "arrival" time, roughly at the end of the track, but I'm not sure how they work out something arrived

    "Tue 06:09:13 PM Arrival () @ Tuesday 06:09:13 PM CEST"

  6. Jurassic Hermit

    Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

    "Canadian open-source intelligence bod Steffan Watkins, whose recent flight tracking research revealed that US intelligence-gathering aircraft were switching transponder codes to pose as benign Malaysian flights off the coast of China"

    What could possibly go wrong?!

  7. Earth Resident

    This is a test

    This has been a test of the Pentagon's commercial aircraft speed and position spoofing system. Had this been an actual flight path, there would have been real world verification of a crash.

  8. Eclectic Man Silver badge
    Happy

    INS drift and Nostalgia

    I realise that Inertial Navigation Systems do drift a bit, but 70 miles in such a short space of time does seem like a fault. I would have expected INS drift to occur for the whole of the flight incrementally, not suddenly 90 degrees change of direction. When they were first introduced, BAe put one of their INS in a car and mapped the roads of Scotland, quite accurately, according to the BBC's Tomorrow's World program.

    I worked on the BAe 146 aircraft when I had a vacation job at Hatfield in 1978, I even had the commemorative (kipper) tie. I didn't fly in one until a holiday to Bhutan, where it is (or certainly was) the only commercial jet certified to land and take off at Paro , Bhutan's international airport. (Nostalgia, eh, what would we do without it?)

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