Eurofighter crash in north east Germany´s ED-R 401 MVPA NE - big thanks to adsbexchange.com!

Everybody has probably heard of yesterdays crash of two Eurofighter mid air, one of them slamming into a field next to a busy Kindergarten. At the village of Nossentiner Hütte, amidst the touristy Lakes District of Mecklenburg Vorpommern state - with tourists looking on from the lake side, as smoking debris went down.

Thanks to ADSBEXCHANGE, we are able to pinpoint the last moments of the Eurofighter ACs. No other tracker has it, everybody is censoring it - afaik. Big thanks to the adsbexchange guys and the community for upholding this last piece of transparency on what will happen when you do "air combat missions" above densely populated holiday hubs in the middle of Europe! I will continue to lobby for support for this outstanding site!

One thing though: The press is suggesting the airspace was "closed" when the incident occured. However, military zone ED-R 401 MVPA NE, the crash site being located in a usual hotspot of weekdaily "air combat training", programmatically mixes civil with military aviation. Usually there will be civil air traffic in the air, at the same time and at the same location, sometimes, as training military AC. Can we somehow recollect on whether there was low level air traffic in the region at around 11.50 UTC? Something similar like the replay function of FR24 for a given time?

 

There is at least one other tracker that has not censored its data.
You won't find any website which has low level air traffic in sparse regions like the Mecklenburg Lake Plateau.

 

Ok, which other tracker has the data? Radarbox? They usually try to censor, too.

Contrary to your second statement, I think FA has plenty of MLAT coverage down to very low level in Mecklenburg, in fact. Unfortunately not publicly displayed - but censored! ADSBX sometimes has ok low level MLAT coverage, viewable for the concerned public, in regard to those slow flying "sports" planes that you can often see close to exercises when military training is on. It also shows pretty much all of PTO and GFD type of planes - if the server isn´t overloaded . So it would probably give a good guess as to whether there was low level civil air traffic simultanously in the area - if there was something like a playback function of any other type of temporal MLAT records for a given area.

 

There is another issue: Due the fact, UAT978 is unused in europe, some Gliders and motorgliders use FLARM at 868 MHz instead. The OGN network tries to receive this traffic but there is no recommendation to built any (flarm oder adsb or any other) kind of transponder in an aircraft below 5.7 tons in the EU. FLARM transmits with only a few milliwatts - ADSB with up to hundreds of watts, receiving FLARM is much more complicated as ADSB.

At ADSB i get ranges smooth below 200 nmi, my FLARM range is about 10 nmi - both receivers with LNA, Filter, 8x CoCo Antenna in correct dimension for the frequency and so on...
FLARM receivers were often provided by aviation clubs, small gliders airfields and so on...

Most of low level traffic in the accident area probably has no ADSB transponder onboard, maybe a FLARM device, maybe not...

 

@ Full throttle: Which other site doesn´t censor military MLAT? You stated this.

As for the Mecklenburg Lakes region - it has a pretty good low level MLAT coverage in the FA backend. It´s more like adsbexchange´s public global radar for the affected MLAT region flakes out very often (overloaded, according to James), so non-coverage of MLAT in the Mecklenburg Lakes region here at adsbx is a combination of probably not enough feeders in the region, adsbx mlat overload and de-activated MODE S transponders - which is common practice with the german military (and they are right - people don´t even mind when fighter jets crash right next to a busy kindergarten… so who needs MODE S?…).
On top of these aspects, @rallyecom noted that civil air traffic uses even different systems in low level altitudes that are not even processed by the usual public MODES S MLAT trackers.