An accurate tally of the number of U.S. active aircraft equipped with ADS-B is now available thanks to the flight tracking app FlightAware. The company, which started with a single feed from FAA ATC data ten years ago, now offers global flight tracking through satellite and ground stations. It can keep track of which aircraft do and don’t emit an ADS-B Out signal. At NBAA-BACE in Orlando, the company released precise data showing about 60 percent of the turbine-powered GA aircraft in the U.S. have met the FAA’s Jan. 2020 equipage mandate.
By the end of September, 10,032 of the 17,179 U.S.-registered turbine-powered aircraft currently operating in the U.S. were sending signals to the thousands of little orange receivers Flight Aware has sent to companies, airports, individuals and government agencies across the U.S. The receivers pick up transponder and ADS-B signals from passing aircraft and feed them to FlightAware’s enormous data crunching machine and the data is extracted from there. Presumably it has the same information for the piston and helicopter fleet and we’ve asked for that. You can see a PDF of the turbine tally by clicking the “Related File” link below this story.
