Does anyone happen to know why the PiAware interface doesn’t do lookups of the ICAO24 address to retrieve the aircraft N number? Seems like this would be handy and even if it was too much of a performance hit to do realtime on the R-Pi, how about a webservice that made this lookup on the web client instead via an AJAX call?
How are you going to convert an ICAO address to a tail number?
How are you going to convert an ICAO address to a tail number?
In the US, the FAA database of all registered US aircraft is freely available for download. It’s updated weekly.
So, from a US prospective, it’s an issue of making use of that data.
Right now, it looks like there is an error with the page.
It was more of a leading question for the original poster. I know there are a bunch of databases out there, some freely available, some not. I know that there are algorithmic mappings between tail numbers and ICAO addresses for specific cases. However it’s a big complicated mess as everyone does it differently, there are no decent AJAX endpoints so you pretty much have to download/convert/host it yourself, and you somehow have to keep the data current. So the short answer to the OP’s question of “why doesn’t piaware [well, dump1090] do this?” is “because it is not a simple thing to do”.
dump1090-mutability has support for using a static database of aircraft info that includes tail number. Currently the standard install uses a database kindly provided by the VRS author; but you can populate the database however you want. Doing so is left as an exercise for the reader…