In february of 2022, I came in contact with Menno Swart, a Dutch aviation journalist. He was looking for someone to build a custom Twitter bot, inspired on ElonJet. Naturally, I offered him my services.
VerstappenJet!
He told me about a Twitter account he set up, to start following Max Verstappen's private jet, the PH-DTF. With my experience in (Twitter) bots and familiarity with the ADS-B Exchange (ADSBX) API, this should not be too hard of a task.
Technical
Okay, so how do we go about tracking planes? Is this even legal??? Short answer: Yes it is perfectly legal. Most airplanes or helicopters worldwide are required to have a transponder to be able to access certain airspaces. This is obviously the case in our target airplane. These signals are very easy to intercept and interpret by anyone with about €50,- of spare cash and a few hours of free time.
Read more about tracking planes yourself here.
Challenges
In this project there we a few challenges I had to overcome:
- Deployment & Maintenance - I expect this project to grow and has to be well structured.
- By building a custom Docker image, I can deploy the bot in a few minutes.
- API Limitations - The ADSBX API is not very well made and can get very expensive.
- By using other data sources and predictions, I can save on requests / hour.
- Screenshots - The tweets should display a screenshot of the current location of the plane.
- Selenium for Python is able to render the radar page of ADSBX.
- Location Resolving - The coördinates of the plane should be displayed as location.
- LocationIQ is a great free solution for this problem.
- Robust - Airplane data can fluctuate or literally disappear in some cases.
- Healthy tolerances and some catches for edge cases solved a lot of these issues.
- Savestates - Needs to remember the state of a plane even after a server restart.
- A database server would be overkill so a local SQLite file is perfect for this.
Escalation
Remember where I said I expected this project to grow? After having the VerstappenJet account running for a few days, I was asked if I could make more bots...
Since I saw this coming from the start, I built the bot so that I could easily add or remove planes and Twitter accounts they are linked to:
"aircrafts": [
{
"icao": "486201",
"registration": "PH-DTF",
"start": "Verstappen's jet just took off near {LOCATION} {FLAG}",
"end": "Verstappen's jet just touched ground near {LOCATION} {FLAG}",
"twitter": "verstappenjet"
},
{
"icao": "485920",
"registration": "PH-GOV",
"start": "Het regeringsvliegtuig is zojuist opgestegen rond {LOCATION} {FLAG}",
"end": "Het regeringsvliegtuig is zojuist opgestegen rond {LOCATION} {FLAG}",
"twitter": "hewaarisdephgov"
}
]Because of this, I had these bots running within a few minutes!
Newspaper
On the 16th of march, 2022, Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant published an article stating Owning a private jet is not at all private anymore.
In this article, I am sadly only being mentioned as "a programmer" but nontheless I am proud of the fact stat something I made reached the news. On the 17th of march, this article made it into the sports section of the printed version of de Volkrkant.
Running Bots
I am currently responsible for the technical aspects of the following bots:
- VerstappenJet - Tracking Max Verstappen
- HeWaarIsDePHGOV - (HeyWhereIsThePHGOV) Tracking the main Dutch Government airplane
- KajsaJetGIV - Tracking another Dutch Government owned airplane