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ACARS Drama

Welcome to the home of ACARS Drama, the leading provider of aircraft based drama ingestion services. This small companion website is designed to provide a brief overview of the ACARS Drama project, along with some code snippets and other information regarding the project, and how you can contribute.

Because I am a massive nerd when it comes to both radio stuff and planes (I was a PPL, almost did commercial but got rejected by the flight school I wanted to train at age 17 because I was ‘too quiet’, a problem I later rectified), I was able to buy a few relatively cheap bits of equipment that can listen for these signals from planes flying over my house, and using some open source software that other, much smarter people than me wrote, I was able to decode them. Because of the sheer volume of the messages it picks up, around 2,000 an hour, most of which are just position and weather data, and automated readings from equipment, it would not be reasonable to post them all via the bot. So when you see a message on the bot, it means that a pilot or crew member on the aircraft typed that into their ACARS terminal, which is usually a Flight Management Computer (FMC) device, like the one shown above.

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