A Flight Watch mail, as it arrives: SQ232 just left Sydney for Singapore. One click follows it live, one opens the departure in the workbench.

Dear fellow aviator,

Four weeks ago I showed you the rebuilt livemap on the RealTraffic website. This time it is a single thing, and it is the one I have been itching to tell you about: RealTraffic now watches the sky for you. Tell it which aircraft, which flight or which piece of airspace you care about, and it emails you when something happens there - and behind that sits a searchable index of every flight in the system.

To be clear before I go on: like the livemap, everything below lives on the website, in your account at flyrealtraffic.com and in your mailbox. It is not a feature of the RealTraffic app - the app is unchanged and keeps feeding your simulator exactly as before.

Here is how it works, with my own rules as the examples.

Every flight, searchable

RealTraffic now keeps an index of every flight it sees: every takeoff, every landing, for every aircraft in the feed, worldwide, for the last fourteen days. The Flights page in your account on the website searches it by registration, callsign or flight number, ICAO hex, aircraft type, operator, departure or arrival airport, or any airport at either end - with a time window in your local time. Flights in the air right now come first, with their current position; every row carries the runways used, the flight time and distance, and links that open the departure or the arrival in the Flight Analysis Workbench.

Fourteen days of SQ232: which airframe flew it, which runway it used, how long it took, and an analysis link for every departure and arrival. The top row is in the air right now.

The same index feeds the livemap on the website: follow an aircraft and the panel lists its previous flights; click an airport and the popup shows what actually departed and arrived in the last six hours, next to the published schedule.

Flight Watch: the sky watches itself for you

And then the part I have wanted RealTraffic to have for years. Flight Watch is a set of rules that run against that stream of flights, around the clock, and email you when something you care about happens.

Watch an aircraft or a flight. Give it a registration, a flight number or a hex code and you get a mail the moment it takes off and the moment it lands - with a link to follow it live, a link that opens the departure or the arrival in the workbench, and a link to all its flights. Your own aircraft. A flight school's fleet. The flight someone you love is on tonight. The quickest way to set one up is the livemap on the website: open any aircraft and click Watch this aircraft.

Every aircraft popup on the website livemap now has a Watch this aircraft link.

Mail goes to whoever should get it. For each rule you can pick the recipient, and recipients do not need a RealTraffic account: add an address, the person confirms it once, and every mail they get carries links to the flight, as well as a link that lets them unsubscribe from the alerts whenever they want. So the instructor gets the fleet, the parents get one aircraft, and you get the lot.

Watch an airspace. An area rule records every aircraft that enters a volume. Pick a published one - a control zone, a TMA, a restricted or danger area - or draw your own polygon, rectangle or circle, and give it a floor and a ceiling as ground, feet above sea level or a flight level. The altitude test is done properly: limits in feet MSL are checked against the aircraft's QNH-corrected altitude using the pressure from the GFS model at that place and time, not the raw transponder value.

Picking a published volume: the restricted area around the Parkes radio telescope, limits prefilled from the catalogue.

Drawing your own: a circle under the FRANE 1M departure out of Gatwick, ground to 1,500 ft. Anything still below 1,500 ft over that spot gets recorded.

Every transit is listed with the time inside, the altitude band the aircraft was seen at and the QNH used - and flagged marginal when it only just made it in. A transit link opens the workbench bracketed on exactly those minutes. Alerts are per transit, or you can switch the mail off and just let the rule record.

Four transits of the Tidbinbilla radio-quiet zone in two weeks, each with the altitude band it was seen at, the QNH used, and a link into the workbench. Aircraft identities blurred here.

The transit opened in the workbench: the track clips the eastern edge of the outer ring, and the altitude trace sits within a few tens of feet of the 8,000 ft ceiling the whole way - which is why the rule flagged it as marginal.

One thing to know: the rule fires whenever an aircraft is inside the volume. It does not know whether a restricted area was active at the time - published hours and NOTAM activation are not available to it - so a transit is a fact about the aircraft, not a finding about the pilot.

Twenty aircraft rules and ten area rules per account. Rules fire whenever they fire and every movement is recorded; only the mail is capped, at thirty a day per account, so a busy zone fills the table rather than your inbox. Flight Watch and the Flights search are Professional Edition features of the website; the pages are visible to everyone with an account, so you can see what they do before deciding.

Getting at it

If you are on Professional, both pages are in your account menu on the website now (not in the app) - Flights and Flight Watch - and the Watch link is in every popup on the website livemap. Go and put your own registration in; the first mail is a small thrill.

If you are on Standard, two ways up. You can upgrade from your dashboard and pay only the difference for the time you have left. Or you can feed: run an ADS-B receiver, send its data to RealTraffic, and your paid Standard subscription is upgraded to Professional at no cost for as long as you keep feeding - Flight Watch, the workbench, the cockpit view, radar, satellite, all of it. Community feeders give me the best low-altitude and small-airport coverage I have anywhere, which is exactly the coverage that makes a takeoff or a landing detectable in the first place. The Feeder page in your account has your feeder ID and the one line of configuration a Raspberry Pi setup needs; if you have never built one, hit reply and I will help you pick the hardware. And if you already feed: thank you. Every one of those transits above was detected by someone's antenna.

Thank you for subscribing. RealTraffic has no investors and no ads; your subscription is what pays for the data, the servers and the months I get to spend building things like this. If something feels wrong, hit reply - I read every one.

Next time

In two weeks: the weather stack - the forecast overlays, the live satellite and radar, the SIGWX charts and SIGMETs - taken apart properly, now that the big announcement is out of the way.

If you have questions, support@flyrealtraffic.com reaches me, or simply hit reply. It is me at the other end - no bots, no support department.

These newsletters are also how important service news reaches you - changes affecting your setup, your subscription or the API - and there is no other channel for that. I send them once, at most twice a month. Adding news@flyrealtraffic.com to your contacts usually keeps them out of the spam folder.

And if you would rather not hear from me at all, please do not mark this as spam - just unsubscribe and you will never hear from RealTraffic again, promise. It does mean you will miss service announcements too, so only do it if you really mean to.

Happy landings!
Balthasar

Riding along in the cockpit of an A320 at FL249 over the Alps, real undercast filling the valleys below. This is RealTraffic now.

Dear fellow aviator,

I have started this newsletter over four times, each time unable to decide which of the amazing new features to showcase first! I'm equally excited about each of the features, so I'll just settle on a general overview in this newsletter and wording in the broadest terms: The livemap has been rebuilt from the ground up, and everything I have been heads-down working on for months is now live.

Traffic and weather used to be two separate maps. They are one map now - and that map has grown a full weather stack, real weather radar, significant weather charts, live SIGMETs, TCAS resolution advisories decoded straight off the Mode S downlink, a 3D cockpit view of any aircraft in the sky right now, and a flight analysis workbench that I genuinely think is an incredibly professional tool useful for incident analysis, but equally every pilot and flight school out there that wants to debrief their flights in amazing detail.

Almost all of it is already included in the subscription you have. A few things are Professional Edition only, and I will flag those as I go. Here is the tour.

One map, and everything is on it

The livemap is now the single place where traffic and weather live together. Traffic toggles on and off with one button, so you can use it as a pure weather map when that is what you want. The time slider at the bottom scrubs the whole scene - traffic, weather, satellite, radar, everything - backwards through the last two weeks. Historical scrub back beyond live is a Pro feature; on Standard the map is live.

Weather you can actually fly around

Turbulence at FL300 along the jet over the northeastern US, with the SIGWX turbulence and icing areas drawn on top. Every parameter is selectable by altitude and can be scrubbed in time.

The GFS panel gives you wind, temperature, sea level pressure, cloud, precipitation, visibility, CAPE, turbulence, dew point, freezing level, tropopause and ceiling - each of them at the altitude you select, and each of them can be scrubbed in time. Pick your cruise level, turn on wind or turbulence, and the jet stream you are about to fight is right there.

A thunderstorm afternoon over Florida: live true colour satellite, real radar, and the METAR and TAF for Southwest Florida, all in one place.

On top of that sit the observed layers: live satellite imagery in true colour and infrared, and observed cloud tops assembled from all five geostationary satellites every ten minutes. And real weather radar - actual composite reflectivity in dBZ from NOAA's NEXRAD network across the United States and all the way out to Guam, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the EUMETNET OPERA composite covering Europe, the Japan Meteorological Agency and the Malaysian Meteorological Department - not a simulation of it. Satellite and radar are Pro; the GFS overlays are in Standard.

SIGWX charts and live SIGMETs

SIGWX over the southeastern US, convective areas in red and turbulence in blue - with a live SIGMET opened to read the actual advisory text.

The significant weather forecast charts the airlines flight-plan with - the WAFC SIGWX products issued by the two World Area Forecast Centres in London and Washington - are now drawn straight onto the map: jet cores, turbulence and icing areas, convective zones, fronts, tropopause heights.

Next to them are the live SIGMETs: whatever is actually being issued right now. Volcanic ash clouds (with the erupting vents marked), thunderstorm areas, severe turbulence and icing, tropical cyclones. If you have ever wanted to plan a flight around a real ash cloud, that is now a thing you can do in about ten seconds.

TCAS/RA events as seen from the cockpit

The RA panel, live. Every line is a real TCAS resolution advisory, decoded from the aircraft's own transponder replies.

This is the one I am most excited about, so bear with me.

When two aircraft get too close, their TCAS units talk to each other and tell the crews what to do: climb, descend, level off, monitor vertical speed. Those advisories are broadcast on 1090 MHz, and RealTraffic now decodes them out of the raw Mode S messages and puts them on the map as they happen - along with emergency squawks. Click the RA button and you get the running list, the two aircraft involved joined by a dashed line, and the exact advisory sequence each crew was given.

An aircraft that has just had a resolution advisory: the RA line shows the advisory sequence, and Analyse opens the encounter in the workbench.

Click any aircraft that has had an advisory and its popup carries an RA line with the advisory sequence and the time it was issued - and next to it an Analyse link that opens the whole encounter in the Flight Analysis Workbench, both aircraft loaded and bracketed on the moment of the advisory. Seeing the advisories on the map is Standard; analysing them requires Pro.

Standard shows you live advisories plus the last 24 hours; Pro goes back 14 days.

Sit in the cockpit of any flight

Down the Hudson at 1,900 feet under a real overcast, in the seat of a helicopter that was genuinely there.

Pick any aircraft on the map, click Cockpit view in its popup, and you are sitting in it. Real terrain and real photogrammetry, real weather from the METAR and GFS area weather it is flying through, real day and night, and the other traffic around it. You can look left, look right, drop back to a chase view, or break away and fly the camera yourself. Live flights run 30 seconds behind reality so the motion can be smoothed, and anything from the last two weeks can be replayed at half, normal or double speed.

Every aircraft popup on the map: Follow, Cockpit view, Copy link, Download data, Analysis.

At night the airports light up properly - approach lighting, runway edge and centreline, touchdown zone, taxiway greens, apron floods, all of it baked from real airport lighting data. Roads and cities are lit up too, worldwide, so a night approach looks like a night approach wherever you happen to be.

Short final into JFK at 365 feet, a real 737 at 02:43Z.

The cockpit view is a Pro feature.

And then take it apart

An RA encounter opened from the map: separation, closure and time-to-CPA, altitudes, vertical rates, speeds and data integrity for both aircraft.

The Analyse link next to an advisory opens both aircraft in the Flight Analysis Workbench, already bracketed on the moment of the advisory.

From there you get separation and closure rate, time-to-CPA, altitudes from every available source, vertical rates, speeds, and the data quality of every single position report. Or point it at one flight instead and get takeoff and landing performance, ILS deviation, touchdown detection and speed outliers. Archived satellite and radar imagery drops in underneath the tracks so you can see the weather that was actually there. There is a 3D situation viewer, KMZ export for Google Earth, and a publish button.

And in 3D, with the closest point of approach marked on both tracks.

It does not need an advisory, either. The Analysis link is in every aircraft popup on the map and works for any flight at all. On Sunday 6 September an Amazon Air freighter ran off the end of runway 30 in Miami; here is the landing analysis I made of it - approach, touchdown point, deceleration along the runway - published as a page that anyone can open, with or without a RealTraffic account: the Miami overrun analysis. That is the publish button at work: once you have made an analysis, one click turns it into a read-only page you can hand to anyone.

The workbench is a Pro feature.

If you are on Standard and want the Pro half

Two ways to get there. You can upgrade from your dashboard at any time and only pay the difference for the time you have left.

Or you can feed. If you run an ADS-B receiver and send its data to RealTraffic, your paid Standard subscription is upgraded to Professional at no cost for as long as you keep feeding - cockpit view, workbench, radar, satellite, the lot. And if you are already feeding, thank you, sincerely: community feeders give me the best low-altitude and small-airport coverage I have anywhere, and every antenna makes the map better for everybody. The Feeder page in your account has your feeder ID and the one line of configuration that a Raspberry Pi setup needs. If you have never built a receiver and fancy it, hit reply - I am happy to help you pick the hardware.

More over the next few weeks

There is far too much here for one email, so I will take these apart one at a time over the coming weeks: the weather stack first, then the cockpit view, then the workbench - with a real analysis published for you to open and play with yourself.

And thank you. I do not say this often enough: RealTraffic has no investors, no ads and no venture money behind it. Your subscription is the entire reason the traffic data gets bought, the servers stay up and I get to spend months building things like this instead of doing something sensible. If you find a bug, or something feels wrong, hit reply - it is me on the other end, and I read every one.

If you have questions, support@flyrealtraffic.com reaches me too.

A reminder worth repeating: these newsletters are also how important service news reaches you - changes affecting your setup, your subscription or the API - and there is no other channel for that. I send them once, at most twice a month. Adding news@flyrealtraffic.com to your contacts usually keeps them out of the spam folder.

And if you would rather not hear from me at all, please do not mark this as spam - just unsubscribe and you will never hear from RealTraffic again, promise. It does mean you will miss service announcements too, so only do it if you really mean to.

Happy landings!
Balthasar

Current ADS-B coverage of RealTraffic's own network - if you see traffic anywhere else in RT, it's from purchased data your subscription helps fund!

Dear fellow aviator,

A quick note first: this newsletter comes to you from RealTraffic's own mail system now instead of Mailchimp. If you hit reply, it's me reading it, and you'll get an answer from me personally.

Feed Your ADS-B Data, Fly for Free

You created a RealTraffic account at some point but never got yourself a license - so this offer is for you: if you run an ADS-B receiver and feed your data to RealTraffic, you get a free Standard license, active for as long as your feed produces good data. No trial period, no credit card, no catches.

That's the full Standard experience: real live air traffic and real weather in your simulator, the livemap with active runway display, and the interactive global weather map - all for pointing an antenna at the sky.

One thing I want to be frank about: the feeder license is a genuine thank-you, not a trick. But RealTraffic is a one-person operation with real costs - the worldwide traffic data I buy to fill in where no feeder lives, the servers, the weather pipeline - and all of that is paid for by people who subscribe. So if you end up flying with RealTraffic regularly, and it's something you can comfortably afford, a subscription is the thing that keeps this whole service airborne. No pressure either way; I'd rather you feed for free than not fly with real traffic at all.

Why am I doing this? Because community feeders are simply the best data source I have. They consistently give the best coverage at low altitudes and around smaller airports - exactly where you want traffic to show up when you're flying the sim. Every new antenna fills a gap on the map, and everyone's traffic gets better, including yours.

Setting Up Takes About Five Minutes

1. Log in to your RealTraffic account at flyrealtraffic.com/account
2. Open the Feeder page - it shows your personal feeder ID and the exact one-line configuration for readsb/tar1090 based setups, which covers most Raspberry Pi ADS-B images. That page also has links that will help you build a receiver if you don't already have one.
3. Add the line shown on the feeder page to your receiver, and you're done. The license activates automatically once your data starts flowing, and stays active while you feed.

Never run a receiver before? A Raspberry Pi, a cheap SDR dongle and a small antenna near a window is genuinely all it takes to get started - hit reply if you'd like hardware advice, I'm happy to point you in the right direction.

If you have any questions, just email support@flyrealtraffic.com and you'll be sure to get a response quickly - or simply hit reply on this message.

One more thing worth mentioning: these newsletters aren't just feature announcements. Important service news - changes that may affect your setup, your license, or the API - also goes out through this channel, and there's no other way for me to reach you. And don't worry about your inbox - I send these once, at most twice a month. So it's worth making sure they actually reach you; adding news@flyrealtraffic.com to your contacts usually does the trick.

Lastly, I really don't want to intrude, so if you no longer wish to receive any email updates from me, please don't mark this as spam, but simply unsubscribe by clicking here: Unsubscribe and you'll never hear from RealTraffic again, promise! That also means you won't get any important service announcements, so please don't unsubscribe unless you really mean to. If you want to delete your account (and never hear from RealTraffic again), log into your dashboard, and hit the delete button. 

Happy landings!
Balthasar