"Chip Hermes" wrote in message
oups.com...

I agree, free would be best! After all, since taxpayers pay for the
FAA to collect the data and operate their infrastructure, it would make
sense that the data is freely available, like weather data is from the
NOAA.

However, your friends at the FAA, AOPA, FlightExplorer, etc, have all
teamed up to make pilots pay for flight tracking data. If the data was
freely available on the internet in some open format (like XML), there
would be countless free services offering flight tracking with superior
technology to the stuff you can pay for.

Companies like AccuWeather were lobbying for the NOAA to stop freely
distributing the data that taxpayers paid to collect. Ultimately, word
got out about their intentions, complaints ensued, and they didn't
get what they wanted. I'd like that precedent to be applied to the FAA
and flight tracking.

Perhaps a few letters to the FAA and AOPA would help.

Chip

You are so right, Chip. This reminds me of the days when the National
Library of Medicine put together their index of the medical literature (with
taxpayer dollars, like the weather data) and sold it to third parties who
then turned around and charged libraries, physicians, and researchers for
the data. About 5 or so years ago (I don't remember exactly when), they
made it freely available on the internet (www.nlm.nih.gov), as it should be.
I'm not sure whether political or other pressures were behind that decision.