Blocked This flight is restricted from public view

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

All MLAT flights seem to be displayed on FA as “Blocked : This flight is restricted from public view”

These are scheduled flights, the details are published - the planes just have a basic responder, is it a bug in the system that they show as blocked?

Flybe United Kingdom 3MZ + MyFA
BEE3MZ · “Jersey” (all flights)
Tracking data for this position-only flight is incomplete and potentially inaccurate.
Don’t want to see these flights?
Edinburgh (EGPH / EDI)
Last seen
Near Manchester, England
11:16 GMT
11:54 GMT
Duration: 37 minutes
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
Status result unknown (track log & graph)
Blocked This flight is restricted from public view.
Aircraft Unknown
Speed (graph)
Altitude (graph)
Distance Direct: 297 km

3

It is somewhat specific to flybe; those flights are having mlat data pushed to production, most mlat data is not going there yet.

If it’s showing up as position only then there is a problem pairing the aircraft / callsign with the scheduled flight info.

… though that particular flight appears to predate mlat (it’s from January); do you have a URL for a specific flight?

4

Not that particular flight, but the same applies to all flyBe flights

flightaware.com/live/flight/BEE9 … 20-1.27389

These are showing as historic, though they are flying the route today

also

flightaware.com/live/flight/EZE31Y is showing

Leeds Bradford Int’l (EGNM / LBA)
Last seen
Near Southampton, England
10:49 BST
result unknown (?)
Duration: n/a
Friday, 10 October 2014
Status result unknown (?) (track log & graph)
Blocked This flight is restricted from public view.
Aircraft Unknown
Speed (graph)
Altitude (graph)
Distance Direct: 321 km

this is scheduled for next week
£28.12
One Way Per Passenger Price

08:20
Eastleigh, Southampton
09:30
Leeds Bradford, Leeds Bradford
Arrival: 09:30 Leeds Bradford, Leeds Bradford (LBA)
Eastern Airways
1h 10’

So is scheduled (sorry I’ve picked up the other leg, but the same applies)

I thought the way ‘Blocked’ flight worked was by looking up the ICAO registration for the plane and seeing if it was on the blocked list, rather than flight matching

FR24 publish the info for this flight
LBA
Leeds
SOU
Southampton
STD 10:35 AM BST
ATD 10:47 AM BST
STA 11:45 AM BST
ETA 11:33 AM BST

Aircraft(JS41)
BAe Jetstream 41
Registration(40098E)
G-MAJL
Altitude 16,950 ft Vertical Speed 0 fpm
Speed 275 kt Track 160°
Latitude 52.6862 Longitude -1.8188
Radar
T-EGNJ33 Squawk 0757

5

I don’t fully understand how this all fits together (maybe dbaker can chime in) but my rough understanding is that FA has a variety of data sources that have different access agreements, and you only see data derived from sources that your account has permission to use. The “blocked from public view” thing means that there is no data on the flight that comes from a completely unrestricted source, so you’re only seeing the flight because you’re logged in with an account that has some extra access (e.g. the enterprise account for ADS-B feeders). You wouldn’t be able to see the flight at all if not logged in.

ADS-B is unencumbered since it’s gathered by FA, but many of the Flybe flights don’t run ADS-B.

I don’t think it’s related to mlat as the EZE flights won’t be getting mlat data, and the flybe flights show it even for flights that predate mlat.

6

I agree that it’s not related to the technology that allows us to see them - what it relates to is that these flights which are now more visible due to MLAT are actually being flagged as blocked - it’s the blocking filter that is wrong.

7

I don’t understand what you mean. What exactly is wrong? The flight isn’t available for public display because the production FA environment has no data source for that flight that allows public display. Gathering mlat data for flights doesn’t change that (yet) - mlat data is not yet treated as a data source suitable for public display, and in fact most of the mlat data isn’t being fed to the production environment anyway.

8

obj is right that there are many data sources with varying access. There are a few issues here and it’s sometimes hard to know which are impacting:

  • For ADS-B feeders, we support “positon-only flight tracking” which means we will show flights where we don’t have a (non-private) flight plan. However, this is not enabled for MLAT yet.

  • Most of the MLAT data is not being processed for display on the FlightAware.com site yet; the best way to access it is through the dump1090 8080 interface

  • Particularly in Europe, flights operate under a call sign that is not the flight number. This can cause lots of confusion since dump1090 will link to the call sign (e.g, BEE12G) instead of what FlightAware displays (e.g., BEE123). In some cases, what’s happening is we’re tracking the flight under the flight number (e.g., BEE123) but you’re looking at the page for the call sign (e.g., BEE12G) which we’re tracking based on data directly from air traffic control or the airline, which we can’t redistribute.

I hope this clears it up. We’re working to improve all of these. Particularly for ADS-B feeders, we push hard to release features as soon as possible, even if there’s rough edges or it’s not a completely coheisve experience.

9

Ahh, I as picking up the link from MLAT information, in which case the message would possibly have been wrong, not so much ‘Blocked’ but more ‘We have no information’ (if the flight info was going into the FA production systems)