Aviation Geofencing Guide

Set up virtual airspace boundaries and receive instant alerts when aircraft enter, exit, or dwell in your monitored zones.

What is Aviation Geofencing?

A geofence is a virtual boundary around a geographic area. In aviation, geofences create monitored zones in airspace — when an aircraft crosses the boundary, the system triggers an alert. This is used for airport perimeter security, restricted airspace monitoring, VIP protection, drone detection zones, and temporary flight restriction (TFR) compliance.

Unlike physical fences, geofences are invisible, configurable, and can be created, modified, or removed instantly. AeroScope checks every tracked aircraft against all active geofences every 12 seconds.

Zone Types

CIRCLE ZONE

Define a center point (latitude/longitude) and a radius in nautical miles. Simple and effective for point-based monitoring — airports, facilities, events.

POLYGON ZONE

Define a series of vertices to create an irregular boundary. Use for oddly-shaped restricted areas, flight corridors, or complex perimeters that circles can't represent.

Alert Types

AlertTriggers WhenUse Case
ENTRYAn aircraft enters the zone boundaryIntrusion detection, approach monitoring
EXITAn aircraft leaves the zone boundaryDeparture monitoring, escort tracking
DWELLAn aircraft remains inside the zone beyond a thresholdLoitering detection, surveillance monitoring

Step-by-Step Setup

  1. Open the GEOFENCES tab in the AeroScope dashboard
  2. Click "Create Zone" and enter a name (e.g., "Airport Perimeter")
  3. Select zone type — Circle or Polygon
  4. Define the boundary — For circles: enter center coordinates and radius. For polygons: define vertex coordinates
  5. Save and activate — The zone appears on the map overlay immediately
  6. Monitor events — Alerts appear in the ALERTS tab and via WebSocket in real-time

Real-World Use Cases

AIRPORT SECURITY

Monitor a 5 NM perimeter around an airport. Get ENTRY alerts for all aircraft approaching, with elevated threat scoring for low-altitude, non-standard approaches.

STADIUM/EVENT SECURITY

Create a no-fly zone around major events. Detect drones and unauthorized aircraft. Combine with UAV detection for comprehensive airspace protection.

MILITARY BASE PERIMETER

Monitor restricted airspace around military installations. Track all civilian aircraft entering the zone and flag military patterns (orbits, racetracks).

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Power plants, government buildings, data centers. Set small geofences with tight DWELL thresholds to detect surveillance or loitering aircraft.

BORDER MONITORING

Create long polygon zones along borders or coastlines. Track cross-border flights and unusual low-altitude activity.

RESEARCH ZONES

Define study areas for academic research — count transits, measure traffic density, collect data for specific geographic regions.

What's Included in Each Alert

A geofence event isn't just a boundary crossing — the alert carries the same enrichment we apply everywhere else: the aircraft's registration and type, military flag, integrity-warning flag, drone score, route-deviation flag, and the 0–100 composite threat score. That way you can quickly tell whether the aircraft that just entered your zone is a scheduled airliner on its normal approach or something genuinely unusual.

Look-Ahead Alerts

For aircraft with stable heading and speed, we project a short dead-reckoned path a few seconds ahead and check whether that path intersects your zone boundary. When it does, we emit a "projected entry" alert tagged separately from actual boundary crossings, typically with 10–60 seconds of lead time. Useful for prep; not a guarantee, because aircraft turn.

Why Some Alerts Are Quiet

If an aircraft is well within its own historical pattern (a scheduled flight on its usual approach to a nearby airport), we tag the alert as routine and you can choose to suppress those. If it's outside that pattern (an unusual altitude, an unusual time of day, a callsign we haven't seen before), it's flagged as worth a look. The decision is rule-based and visible in the alert payload.

Geofence events can also trigger webhook deliveries to external systems (Slack, Discord, Teams, Telegram, or custom HTTP endpoints).

SET UP YOUR FIRST GEOFENCE

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is aviation geofencing?
A geofence is a virtual boundary around an area of airspace; when a tracked aircraft crosses it, the system triggers an alert. AeroScope checks every tracked aircraft against all active geofences every 12 seconds, supporting both circle and polygon zones.
What alerts can a geofence trigger?
Enter, exit and dwell events — alert when an aircraft enters a zone, leaves it, or loiters inside beyond a threshold. These map to use cases such as airport perimeter security, stadium and event restrictions, base perimeters and critical-infrastructure monitoring.
What is the difference between circle and polygon zones?
A circle zone is defined by a centre point and radius — quick to set up around a fixed asset. A polygon zone traces an arbitrary multi-point boundary for irregular areas such as a border segment or an event footprint.
How quickly does a geofence alert fire?
AeroScope evaluates every tracked aircraft against all active zones on each pipeline cycle — every 12 seconds — so enter, exit and dwell alerts fire within that window of the aircraft crossing the boundary.