I watched a special the other night about US Airways flight 1549. I wanted to throw a idea out there, since they have a hard time tracking migrating geese, why dont they enlist the piaware community to use pis and cameras to watch the skys to help track these migrations and report them to the atc. Just a idea, the pi cameras are cheap enough.
I’m not saying this is a bad idea, and I like the out-of-the-box thinking. However, I think there would be several issues and challenges here. To start there would be:
- Having the camera pointed in the right direction at any given time to pick up a flock of birds
- Having software that can access the camera and then identify birds flying as opposed to aircraft or other objects, that also doesn’t overload the relatively low-powered SBC processors.
- Identifying the flock’s altitude, direction, and velocity from a 2-dimensional image.
- Pi cameras are (usually) intended to operate directly from the board, and many of the Pis are located indoors (e.g. mine is in my basement). Not insurmountable, but yet more wiring is required.
- There are relatively few ADS-B receivers compared to what would be needed. Having one for every five square miles in a major city and one for every hundred square miles in rural areas mostly works fine with radio signals to gather up-to-date GPS locations and to calculate MLAT. However, due to the limitations of camera technology (especially the small, inexpensive cameras like those used with an R Pi), visual identification would be limited to (at best!) perhaps a mile from each receiver. Maybe it could work for important airports near cities, but even then the coverage would be incomplete.
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