Guys I am a bit confused about what the Injector is supposed to do.
Is it supposed to inject real and live traffic precisely as per what I see on FlightRadar24 ? Or only something that looks like it ?
I’m asking because at the moment, and following the instructions, I don’t see in the sim any aircraft that I can actually see on FR24.
Thank you.
It’s an approximation that uses flight schedules to generate traffic but I don’t know the actual details of it. It doesn’t use live tracking data to the best of my knowledge. (Note - this might be incorrect. They may use some kind of data from FR24 after all.)
The only program I know of that actually used live data was Enhanced Live Traffic which got data from Flightradar24. With that you could directly compare their maps and what you see in the sim. It quit working about a year ago though when Flightradar shut us out.
Streaming that data costs money and where there have been services with live data for simming, they’ve been expensive.
The FlightAware Firehose data is delayed live data and available in the sim for free. It’s a subset of actual data though. I don’t believe they forward GA traffic. I think it’s just all commercial flights maybe for privacy reasons.
All that ADSB data the various aggregators sell access to comes from people who run receivers on their own dime and contribute the data. I’ve got one and it’s really interesting. I contribute data to FlightAware, FlightRadar24, and ADSBExchange and in return I get premium access on all three platforms. Highly recommended.
What we need (and I’ve asked with no responses) is to get the kind of access Enhanced Live Traffic had again. The aggregators would get more coverage and we’d get live real world traffic again including GA aircraft.
It wouldn’t be hard to get live traffic direct from my receiver. I’ve got an airport close enough that I can see all aircraft there on the ground from as soon as they power up if they are ADSB equipped. It’s open source software that runs on a Raspberry Pi. The problem is I’d only see what my receiver can see. It covers the state where I am but outside my area, planes would just disappear when they reach the range limit.
We’d need to be a user group to get them to pay attention to us. What we could offer would be (hopefully) lots of added receivers and better coverage. In return, we could ask for access to all the data worldwide.
It would be interesting to know how many of us are running ADSB receivers. That would give us an idea of how much we might matter. But I think the only way we can ever get access back like we used to have is to be able to show what value we bring. We can’t do that without organizing to be able to ask/act as a group.
@N7783L A thousand thanks for the detailed explanation and background information, this is very interesting.
I was looking at FSLTL because I found out (today) that my ELT wasn’t working any more. I hadn’t been using it recently but it’s an awesome piece of addon.
Thanks for confirming that FSLTL won’t give me live/correct traffic.
So from what you’re saying, FR24 has prohibited ELT from using their data, correct ? A few people in the comment section of the flightsim.to page of ELT were saying that it doesn’t work for them either anymore.
Surprised to read these comments as, as far as I knew, FSLTL did indeed take its feed from FR24 - I occasionally have FR24 running whilst flying in the sim and could see “real life” traffic being injected by FSLTL (on Little Navmap). But I haven’t checked recently.
Anyone who is following Beyond ATC on their Discord is aware that they will be using an historic sub-set of data from FR24 for their traffic injection, as real life data is “horribly expensive”. Maybe FR24 has clamped down, I’ll check next time I’m in the sim.
It could be I’m mistaken about that given what @Terrylawdinn said. If they are using FlightRadar24 data then unless they are paying for it, it could possibly go away sometime if FlightRadar figures it out. The aggregators let nonpaying users see maps and track flights but data streams get expensive.
So maybe they do use FlightRadar? If you are at or nearing an airport, it could always get a snapshot of the airport activity to use as a starting point for aircraft placement.
So take that one with a grain of salt. I said I wasn’t certain. 
But about ADSB itself I am certain. Using ELT I used to have a blast when Virgin Galactic would fly or the EAA would bring antique aircraft to town. It was about the height of cool watching arrivals at Oshkosh especially when planes would arrive in pairs and peel off to land.
I don’t know that we are “prohibited” from using their data but ELT doesn’t work anymore and just quit back when I was using it a lot. I looked in the log file and tried one of ELT’s commands to get data (just copy/paste into the URL field of a browser) and got nothing. Something about the request format broke and I couldn’t sort out what they were looking at to know it was a program. Before, I’d get a line of data for each plane it returned.
It seems the ELT author has abandoned it (I don’t know) but it is on GitHub.
Okay, I’ve just loaded up the sim at EGNT and set FSLTL away. Little Navmap shows several aircraft in the area and I see them also on FR24 (I have a subscription if that makes any difference). They all seem to be within one minute of their positions, comparing FR24 to FSLTL.
And just to add to the realism as I write, in the sim a Tomjet, TOM67J, G-TUMB, has just taxied out, I can see it on FR24 and I can hear it in real life, as I live right next door to Newcastle Airport! Doesn’t get any more real-to-life than that!
@Terrylawdinn Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond, this is encouraging.
I’m doing more testing and seem to be facing several issues.
Let me try to debug them. Let’s start with this one: FSLTL seems to be generating “imaginary” traffic that have never been in FR24. Let me give you an example: I am based in Hong-Kong, it’s 5am here and the only real activity is at the cargo appron. I launch FSLTL, and a few aircraft will spawn in the cargo appron. I know that they are generated by FSLTL because if I Reset Traffic in the FSLTL menu, they will disappear, and new ones will spawns in slightly different locations. I can do that several times, and every time new airplanes will be generated in slightly different locations. They also seem to push back all at the same time, and taxi on taxiways they shouldn’t be.
Any idea ? Below are my settings.
@N7783L Thanks for the further comments, I will uninstall ELT. Seems no point keeping it. A shame.
I really thought FSLTL didn’t use live traffic but they kind of do?
User Guide – FSLTL – FS Live Traffic Liveries (general info - better description at the link below)
It doesn’t seem to do it like Enhanced Live Traffic which only smoothed between position reports. In ELT planes could be sideways on a taxiway or other oddness until things caught up. FSLTL seems to use flight schedules a lot and that user guide refers a lot to AI traffic.
They do say they are using FlightRadar24 to know to inject aircraft but they apparently inject either in air or at a gate and then FSLTL takes over the way I read it. Again, if I read that right, they are real aircraft being injected at about the right time (30 sec delay) but if it turns on a particular taxiway, the injected airplane will take whatever route the injector decides to get it to whatever runway.
https://fslivetrafficliveries.com/support-faq/
“Because we can’t inject already taxing traffic - anything on the ground in FR24 moving or not - will be put at the gate. If the aircraft then moves in FR24 above 4kts - we will mark it for departure and the sim will start the preflight. This is why people seem to think FR24 injection is 5 - 10 mins delayed - it’s not - it’s 30 seconds. It’s just how long the sim uses before pushback for the preflight.”
It sounds like they start planes at gates and then take over, or in the air and then take over. If you check the guide, they also explain how to get it to do more realistic departure and arrivals.
It doesn’t sound like they are actively monitoring flights around a player except for new planes within your circle. But if a plane in real life takes off, declares an emergency, and returns, the injected aircraft would probably still continue on to destination.
Maybe someone knows for sure, but according to those pages it’s apparently normal that someone at an airport would see planes doing very close to what the real airplanes do, even from the proper gates since they are placing planes using FlightRadar24 data.
Which may also be how they are getting around streaming data. ELT streamed like a bandit getting aircraft data every few seconds. It sounds like FSLTL is accessing different data sort of. They talk about planes over 4kts on ground being moved to gates to depart - apparently if you spawn in at an airport but I don’t know the exact circumstances and I don’t know where they are getting the 4kts speed info. Maybe the data comes in a real call to FR24 for map data but is very careful to limit how much it does that?
It seems the ADSB information is only used to place aircraft, though. After that it’s FSLTL and historical schedules and replaying standard procedures. But those links are all I’m going on.
@N7783L Thanks for posting this.
Based on this, it is quite clear that FSLTL doesn’t stream flights from FR24 like ELT does/did.
I just spent about half an hour on the tarmac at Haneda observing what FSLTL is doing: initially, it creates the traffic. It is true that these traffic have the same callsigns as what I see on FR24 (and they’re all there, very cool). But, my observations:
.I think this is entirely consistent with your post.
I’m not criticizing FSLTL, what it does is cool. Not the alternative for ELT I was looking for, but it’s cool. And free.
FSLTL only injects traffic, then msfs is responsible for moving it…
It’s going to take one of the data aggregators making a deal of sorts to get flight simmers to trade hosting receivers and contributing data to get access to that data. When ELT ran it was asking for lots of data. FSLTL apparently is still using real world data but much less and we haven’t been cut off yet. They got wise to ELT though.
I don’t know how much the built-in FlightAware Firehose data gets filtered but that might be closer to what ELT did. It is delayed about 5 minutes IIRC though and GA traffic and maybe other traffic is removed.
This could be a business opportunity for someone, though. My receiver runs a Raspberry Pi OS image with some added software to decode the ADSB transmissions out of a special (about $25) receiver and send those to FlightAware. The other aggregators get data either from their own standalone setups or just installing some routines that grab data that the FlightAware stuff is already generating. If we had some servers we could have another set of routines that send data to those which could be specifically purposed for sim uses. Just like the aggregators do, people who donate data could get free or especially cheap access while others pay.
It would take a while to get enough people involved to get good coverage. There’s 5 or 6 people near me all sending data to FlightAware. Maybe 2 that send data to FlightRadar24 and same for ADSBExchange (they all tell you how many receivers are getting signals from a particular airplane).
Best would be if one of the existing aggregators would see this as an opportunity. The communications could be streamlined to be as lightweight as possible. The ELT comms were pretty inefficient. There’d be a network of receivers already in place but they could grow that for better coverage. Or some company already doing flight sim things could do it.
Hi, why the planes departing New York KLGA&KEWR stay low at 300ft???
