Offline Flight Tracking system with noise pollution measurement

Abstract

This project is about developing a standalone system that could plot all flights in Hong Kong airspace on a map without Internet connection. We aim to place this system at the Meeter and Greeters Hall in the Hong Kong International Airport to provide the general public visualized real-time flight information received from trustworthy receivers, which are from the PCCW Solutions Limited. Useful information, like the flight number and its corresponding airline, will be displayed in this system too. Another purpose of this system is to facilitate aircraft maintenance inspectors' work in poor internet connection area such as the airport runway. Hence, it is designed to be an offline system. ADS - B signal collected from Kinetic's SBS-3 Mode-S ADS-B receiver provided by the PCCW Solutions Limited will be used as the data source for the system. Capturing BaseStation data feed, a translated format of ADS-B signal, from port 30003 with BaseStation (an official application developed by Kinetic for the SBS-3 Model), translating the raw data and recording the decoded flight data into a standalone database will be implemented. Moreover, a database is also built to store the standard aircraft and flight data such as aircraft model and flight route as the ADS-B signal only provide limited information like aircraft ICAO code. By merging received data and the standard data, this system is able to display all valuable information about the flights in Hong Kong Air Space. Aircraft noise measurement is another key feature in this project. Although the ADS-B signal doesn't contain any data related to airplane noise, assessment could be conducted through building a database with records of sound level emitted by every civil transport aircraft type with reference to the Noise Certification Database, a database developed by the French DGAC, providing A-weighted noise levels of civil transport aircraft types certificated mainly under the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and also under the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) regulations. (French DGAC, 2016) By logging what aircraft passed through a particular point, equivalent continuous A-weighted sound pressure level aroused by aircrafts could be calculated. Showing noise impact made by the airplanes on various location in Hong Kong is the ultimate goal in this project.