So for two nights (evenings) in a row now there has been an aircraft doing ~120-150kts circling at 10,000' over northern Winnipeg. The ICAO code is ~68BA9B and no other information (other than altitude, direction and speed) is available. When it finally came into land, it swung out and came in on runway 013. No big deal - except all other aircraft were landing on 018. Are helicopters in Canada broadcasting ADS-B now? That is, could this maybe be our City of Winnipeg Police AIR-1 chopper? Hey if nothing else, since Flight Aware isn't telling my much about this weird bird, it's lit a fire under my butt to get my feed to ADSB Exchange up and running
Interesting. That ICAO doesn't have any registration known, at least to the ADSBX site: https://flight-data.adsbexchange.com/activity?inputSelect=icao&icao=68BA9B
In the last hour or so I've answered one of my questions - helicopters (at least some) are broadcasting ADS-B signals. There was a private Bell type chopper picked up by my site that I saw on the custom feed page.
I've poked around a few different ICAO databases and have come up empty. Bit of a mystery this bird is....
An ICAO starting with a tilde is a fake one generated by FlightAware on MLAT returned data for aircraft that they are blocking. Sort the list of aircraft in Skyview by altitude. There will be another aircraft at approximately the same altitude but not broadcasting lat/long. Look up that one instead. Mostly these will be biz jets where some hotshot doesn’t want to be tracked, but sometimes you see interesting stuff, like an RCMP Pilatus that was practising left turns orbiting YYZ for 6 hours today.
