September 2nd - Flightradar24 have a treat for aviation enthusiasts
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Where's my plane? That call has gone out thousands of times this summer with so many delays. Flightradar24 can usually supply the answer – bringing an incredible amount of real-time aviation intelligence to the world. Ahead of the publication of a Flightradar24 puzzle book called You're the Captain (for which I have contributed the foreword) I have been talking to co-founder Mikael Robertsson and one half of the FR24 AvTalk podcast, Ian Petchenik.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 2nd of September. |
| 0:08.3 | And that's going to be quite a significant month for an aviation organization called Flight Radar 24, because the first book that they have produced is going to be coming out. So I'm very excited about that. |
| 0:22.5 | Declaration of interest, I have written the foreword, but that's partly because I'm so excited |
| 0:27.4 | about the whole Flight Radar 24 story and experience. I'm delighted to be joined by Mike Robertson, |
| 0:37.2 | who is one of the co-founders of Flight Radar 24, |
| 0:41.2 | and Ian Petchnik, who if you listen to the AvTalk podcast, you will know as one half of that |
| 0:47.9 | marvellous aviation broadcast. I'm going to start Mike with you by saying, look, for goodness sake, 20-07, I am aware that |
| 0:59.5 | these Swedish guys reckon that they can track most flights around the planet. And I'm thinking |
| 1:06.3 | that is completely impossible because you're going to need thousands of people with the right receiving |
| 1:12.5 | equipment in order to be able to share the data with you, then you're going to have to have |
| 1:17.7 | a monumental system set up somewhere, let's call it Stockholm, in which all that information |
| 1:24.0 | is protest and then distributed worldwide to millions of users. It cannot possibly |
| 1:29.6 | work. So, Mike, what went right? So we started very small. Our initial goal was to have coverage |
| 1:39.0 | in Stockholm. That's where we started with two receivers. And then we wanted to expand to Sweden. |
| 1:45.5 | And once we got coverage in Sweden, our goal was Europe. |
| 1:49.8 | And at the beginning, we didn't plan to go beyond Europe. |
| 1:54.3 | And then Iceland made big news in April 2010 with the Icelandic Ash Cloud. |
| 2:02.6 | And this was the first time that Flight 324 got media attention. |
| 2:07.6 | And we got a lot of media attention in between the 10th and 17th of April. |
| 2:13.6 | We got like onto the biggest media around the world, CNN, BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera, everyone used us. |
| 2:23.0 | And we went for a small underground service used by maybe 10,000, 20,000 people to a global service used by 4 million users per day. |
| 2:39.0 | So that's when we understood that this is not a small hobby project anymore. This is something global. |
... |
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