Known limitations
A surveillance tool whose limits you do not know is more dangerous than one whose limits you do. Here is precisely what AeroScope cannot see and must not be used for.
What AeroScope cannot do
Most platforms bury this. We publish it, because a surveillance tool whose limits you do not know is more dangerous than one whose limits you do.
| Limitation | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| ADS-B only | Aircraft that do not broadcast ADS-B are invisible to AeroScope. That includes many older general-aviation aircraft, most small consumer drones, and aircraft operating with transponders switched off. Absence from the map is not evidence of absence from the sky. |
| Coverage is volunteer-dependent | Reception requires a ground receiver within roughly 200–300 NM. Coverage is dense over North America and Europe and sparse over oceans, deserts and remote terrain, and nothing fills that gap: AeroScope has no satellite feed. |
| Spoofing detection is probabilistic | Our integrity and consistency checks, including a Kalman normalized-innovation test and a composite 0 to 100 spoof score, catch broadcasts that contradict physics or their own metadata. A well-constructed, physically plausible spoof can pass. A clean result means "nothing detected", not "verified genuine". |
| The attention score is a ranker | The 0–100 score orders what deserves a look first. It is not an accusation, a threat verdict, or an intelligence assessment, and a high score routinely has an innocent explanation. |
| Drone detection is partial | We read Remote ID and larger UAS that broadcast, and flag low-and-slow candidates behaviorally. A silent consumer drone cannot be seen by any ADS-B-based system, including this one. |
| Identity can be wrong | Registry lookups can be stale, callsigns can be reused or spoofed, and some operators deliberately mask identity. Treat identity as an indication, not proof. |
| Timing is near-real-time, not instantaneous | There is latency between a broadcast, its republication by a feed, our fetch cycle, and your screen. Positions are current to within seconds, not milliseconds. |
| The GNSS interference map is a proxy, not a sensor | It flags aircraft reporting NIC below 7 or NACp below 8 in each H3 hexagon, and needs at least 8 distinct aircraft in an hour before a cell is shown. Uncertified (SIL 0) installations are excluded, but it still infers interference from degraded reports, it does not measure the RF spectrum directly. |
What this platform is, and is not, for
AeroScope is an awareness, research and analysis tool. It is suitable for understanding the airspace above a location, studying ADS-B data quality and anomaly detection, and building situational awareness from open data.
It must not be used for air-traffic control, navigation, collision avoidance, or any safety-of-life purpose. It is not certified for operational aviation use, carries no airworthiness or DO-178C approval, and makes no completeness guarantee. Official air-traffic services and certified equipment exist for those roles and cannot be substituted by a crowdsourced open-data platform.
Equally, an aircraft appearing on this platform is broadcasting its position publicly by design. Observing public broadcasts is legal; using them to harass, target or endanger anyone is not, and is a misuse of this tool.
Known gaps we are working on
These are open, acknowledged weaknesses rather than roadmap marketing:
- Oceanic and polar coverage stays thin, because ground receivers cannot reach there and we use no space-based feed.
- Anomaly detection is evaluated on our own published benchmark; independent third-party evaluation is welcome and the dataset is open precisely so others can check our numbers.
- Registry coverage varies by country; some aircraft resolve to a hex address only.
- The platform is maintained by one researcher, so response and release cadence is best-effort, see status.