flightaware.com/live/flight/N85T … S/tracklog
My receivers both are picking it up and showing positions that are not continuous. Seems like a rounding error or bad data somewhere.
I thought maybe it was a reception issue on my end, but the tracklog from the local airports also are noisy. Is the transponder on the plane going bad or something?
Does just look like garbage data from the transponder, multiple receivers reporting the same implausible values (mostly the reported altitude jumping all over the place)
Previous flights from the same aircraft show similar problems.
Not just altitude. Here are screen shots from my two receivers.
http://victorspictures.com/img/s9/v86/p1973987269-3.jpg
http://victorspictures.com/img/s9/v95/p2143570295-3.jpg
Notice that there are three different tracks: the one between Austin and San Antonio, which is where the plane actually was, the one by San Angelo, and the one south of Houston. And apparently, there are others out of the field of view, but since they are off screen, I can’t tell easily if they track (are roughly linear) like the others.
I haven’t looked at the source data yet (and may not if I don’t find the time) but this looks to me like one of the bits is stuck or something.
this looks as if somehow messages from two planes got mixed up. maybe there’s two planes out there with the same transponder id. i’m pretty convinced that this is not a good idea, but i don’t think that’s something that can be helped.
That was a possibility I looked at, but the data doesn’t really support it in this case; the bad data just looks bad, it doesn’t look like plausible data from another aircraft, and it’s too much of a coincidence that the two conflicting aircraft would always be flying at the same time.