Plotting trajectories

It is sometimes usefult to visually inspect flight trajectories. This vignette provides some examples and code snippets that show how to plot trajectories from Flight Radar 24 feed. In fact the snippets here can be used with any dataframe of position reports containing at least timestamp, longitude, latitude and altitude fields.

Plotting

In order to get some sample trajectory data, you can use the trrrj package datasets:

flts: 41 flights from FR24 for 2017-02-05 and 2017-02-05, check the documentation via ?flts
poss: ADS-B positions reports for flts, check the documentation via ?poss
cprs: CPR’s matching flts, check the documentation via ?cprs

We now plot the ADS-B positions just for one flight, flight RYR19QK from Comiso to Malpensa:

date	flight	callsign	equip	fr24_id	nm_id	adep_icao	adep_iata	ades_icao	ades_iata
2017-02-06	FR8730	RYR19QK	B738	207752905	884714	LIMC	MXP	LICB	CIY

We can now plot the ADS-B trajectory:

europe <- c(left = 5, bottom = 35, right = 30, top = 52)

# let's just focus on 1 flight
trj_adsb <- poss %>%
  dplyr::filter(flight_id == 207752905)

trrrj::plot_flight_horizontal(trj_adsb, bbox = europe)

2D plot via ggmap

and the one from the CPRs:

trj_cpr <- cprs %>% 
  filter(callsign == "RYR19QK")

trj_cpr %>% 
  trrrj::plot_cpr_horizontal(europe, linewidth = 1.3, colour = "blue")

2D plot via ggmap

We can also see the vertical profiles vs distance (for the ADS-B trajectory):

plot_flight_vertical_distance(trj_adsb %>% cumulative_distance())

Flight’s vertical profile vs. distance

or time:

plot_flight_vertical_time(trj_adsb %>% cumulative_time())

Flight’s vertical profile vs. time

Now let’s plot all CPR trajectories (with automatic bounding box):

cprs %>%
  plot_cpr_horizontal(linewidth = 1.3)

A map of all sample CPR trajectories

Base map: Europe

The pruatlas package provides a base map for Europe using a Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area projection. It could be a useful package to further extend for plotting trajectories. It is on PRU’s github account, euctrl-pru/pruatlas.

Retrive FR24 ADS-B data from DB

The trrrj package provides an API to retrieve FR24 data from the DB. The use case here is for flights around an airport.

Before continuing BE CAREFUL about how to use it, you could get a lot of data back and il could take a lot of time.

Let’s say you want to retrieve the arrival flow to Stavanger airport in Norway for the 6th Sep 2017, then you need to issue the following command (showing the first 10 ones only):

svg20170906flt <- export_flights_at_airport_fr24("2017-09-06T00:00:00Z",
                                                 "2017-09-07T00:00:00Z",
                                                 "SVG",
                                                 flow = "ARR")

# fake the ROracle call
load(file = paste0(here::here(), "/data/flts.rda"))

svg20170906flt <-  flts %>%
  as_tibble() %>%
  filter(real_to == "BRU")

knitr::kable(
  head(svg20170906flt, 10),
  caption = "Arrival flights at Stavanger airport, Norway, on Sep 6, 2017 (10 only)")

Arrival flights at Stavanger airport, Norway, on Sep 6, 2017 (10 only)
flight_id	aircraft_id	reg	equip	callsign	flight	schd_from	schd_to	real_to	date
207635488	4509122	OOSNB	A320	BEL3292	SN3292	TLV	BRU	BRU	2017-02-05

To get the position reports 40 NM around the airport for those flights (showing the first 10 ones):

library(trrrj)
# TODO: handle the case when building w/ Oracle DB
svg20170906pos <- export_flights_at_airport_fr24(
  "2017-09-06", "2017-09-07",
  "SVG", 5.638, 58.877,
  flow = "ARR",
  radius = 40)
# knitr::kable(head(svg20170906pos, 10))

Then prepare the data and then plot:

svg20170906pos <- svg20170906pos %>% 
  rename(longitude = LON, latitude = LAT) %>% 
  mutate(longitude = as.numeric(longitude), latitude = as.numeric(latitude))

svg20170906flt <- svg20170906flt %>% 
  rename(callsign = CALLSIGN)

svg20170906pos <- svg20170906pos %>% 
  left_join(svg20170906flt)

plot_flight_horizontal(svg20170906pos)

(File) Archived Trajectories

FR24 archive files can be accessed with standard R tools like readr to retrieve the flight list for some of the companion sample files in this package:

library(trrrj)
library(dplyr)
library(purrr)
library(readr)

######## flights
flights_dir <- system.file("extdata", package = "trrrj")
flights_csvs <- dir(flights_dir, pattern = "201702.._flights\\.csv", full.names = TRUE)
flights <-  purrr::map_df(flights_csvs, read_csv)

Here are the first 10 entries (some variables omitted):

flight_id	reg	equip	schd_from	schd_to	real_to
207610917	OKYBA	A333	PRG	ICN	ICN
207541132	EIEBP	B738	CHQ	SKG	SKG
207587763	GCIXW	E170	HAM	LCY	LCY
207507520	VTANP	B788	AMD	LHR	LHR

A sample of FR24 flight data is available as flts dataset in the package. See also the relevant help page, ?flts.

(File) Archived Positions

ADS-B Positions

The trrrj package provides helpes to read position report files from FR24 archive data feed. In order to read the ADS-B position reports for the days from the previous section:

######## positions
poss_dirs <- c("20170206_positions", "20170205_positions")
poss_dirs <- system.file("extdata", poss_dirs, package = "trrrj")
poss_csvs <- dir(poss_dirs, pattern = "201702.._.*\\.csv", full.names = TRUE)
positions <- purrr::map_dfr(poss_csvs, read_positions_fr24)

# augment with flight info
positions <- positions %>%
  left_join(flights, by = "flight_id") %>%
  filter(!is.na(callsign), callsign != "YELLOW6")

The first 10 entries (some variables omitted) for flight “AIC175” (flight_id = 207507520) are:

flight_id	timestamp	altitude	heading	latitude	longitude	speed
207507520	2017-02-05 04:56:15	38000	291	36.18664	52.95428	425
207507520	2017-02-05 04:57:17	38000	291	36.23184	52.81566	424
207507520	2017-02-05 04:58:18	38000	291	36.27630	52.67845	424
207507520	2017-02-05 04:59:20	38000	291	36.32181	52.53754	424
207507520	2017-02-05 05:00:21	37975	291	36.36580	52.40049	422
207507520	2017-02-05 05:01:22	38000	291	36.40934	52.26424	423
207507520	2017-02-05 05:02:26	38000	291	36.45547	52.11931	423
207507520	2017-02-05 05:03:28	38000	291	36.49900	51.98169	424
207507520	2017-02-05 05:04:30	38000	291	36.54406	51.83893	423
207507520	2017-02-05 05:05:33	38000	291	36.58923	51.69468	425

A sample of FR24 ADS-B position report data is available as poss dataset in the package. See also the relevant help page, ?poss.

(File) Archived Correlated Position Reports (CPR’s)

The trrrj package provides facilities to read NM’s archived CPR files. In order to import all cprs for the 2 demo days:

# read all 5th and 6th February 2017 CPR's files
# cprs_dirs <- system.file("extdata", package = "trrrj")
# cprs_delims <- dir(
#    cprs_dirs,
#    pattern = "1.2017020.1001tacop304ARCHIVED_OPLOG_ALL_CPR\\.gz",
#    full.names = TRUE)
cprs_delims <- c(
  trrrj_example("1.201702051001tacop304ARCHIVED_OPLOG_ALL_CPR.gz"),
  trrrj_example("1.201702061001tacop304ARCHIVED_OPLOG_ALL_CPR.gz"))

poss_cpr <- purrr::map_dfr(cprs_delims, read_cpr)

and then show the first 10 entries (some variables omitted) for the same flight, “AIC175”, as for the ADS-B positions:

tact_id	timestamp_track	callsign	flight_level	track_heading	latitude	longitude	track_speed
847918	2017-02-05 07:25:16	AIC175	400	304.7772	42.63778	30.22139	461
847918	2017-02-05 07:25:25	AIC175	400	311.4294	42.65250	30.20500	480
847918	2017-02-05 07:25:50	AIC175	400	312.6158	42.68667	30.14944	462
847918	2017-02-05 07:25:54	AIC175	400	309.5233	42.69167	30.14389	457
847918	2017-02-05 07:26:19	AIC175	400	311.1658	42.72667	30.08583	462
847918	2017-02-05 07:26:28	AIC175	400	307.4578	42.73833	30.06889	463
847918	2017-02-05 07:26:48	AIC175	400	311.4350	42.76778	30.02306	464
847918	2017-02-05 07:26:57	AIC175	400	308.3697	42.78000	30.00639	464
847918	2017-02-05 07:27:21	AIC175	400	311.6161	42.81611	29.94917	466
847918	2017-02-05 07:27:30	AIC175	400	308.6775	42.82833	29.93306	465

A sample of NM’s CPR’s data is available as cprs dataset in the package. See also the relevant help page, ?cprs.

Enrico Spinielli