ABOUT

This is one of those personal projects that's been in the back of my mind for literally years, waiting for the right opportunity to bring to life. With a combination of unexpected time, the availability of live ADS-B data and the skill to build it all, ROTOR is a recreation of the experience of the 1990’s-era IUKADGE (Improved UK Air Defence Ground Environment) with aircraft movements sourced from live ADS-B data but mimicing the UI and operation of the original 1950's VAX/VMS round consoles. Think FlightRadar24, but focused on the original mission of aircraft detection, classification and tracking over the UK air defence zone.

I have built the system from the ground up to store, process, and analyse upwards of 35 million aircraft movements per day acquired from an ADS-B compatible data source at a 2 second resolution. Considerable attention has been made in optimising the data acquisition, storage and processing such that the entire system and its microservices can be deployed as containers on commodity hardware.

I also built an Xplane 12 integration which feeds data into the ROTOR system as if it were an ADS-B data source, with customisations built using Lua to extend the Xplane 12 flight simulator’s aircraft model to simulate an AWACS asset acquiring and tracking the AI aircraft within that simulation, whilst contributing its tracks to the simulated IUKADGE air picture.

A thoroughly enjoyable project which finally allowed me to scratch that itch!