Welcome to the home of ACARS Drama, the leading provider of aircraft based drama ingestion services.
This small companion website is designed to provide a brief overview of the ACARS Drama project, along with some code snippets and other information regarding the project, and how you can contribute.
The latest drama ingested is shown below:
A project to map out every broken coffee maker in the sky
A question I’ve been asked a few times since I took a little project I had for a year or so operating privately under my desk, and turned it into a social media bot.
Note: this post is designed as a more high-level overview of what ACARS/VDLM2 messages are, and what my bot they feed is. So, if you’re looking for a more detailed technical overview of how the bot works, check out this earlier post from when it was first created as a Slack app.
When an aircraft is flying overhead, various radio signals are being transmitted and received by said aircraft constantly. Some examples of the radio signals, of course, are voice communications between pilots and air traffic controllers, that most people are familiar with. These are, of course, critical for safety, and ensuring planes are at the right altitude, going in the right direction, and at the right speed.
In addition to voice, there are also a boat-load, well, plane-load I guess, of data signals. Amongst these data signals are the two types of signal that feed the bot’s insatiable thirst for drama. They are ACARS and VDLM2.
ACARS, which stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, is a 1970’s era protocol that is still used today. A bunch of ground stations around the world are used to translate messages between computers in dispatch, maintenance and operations control rooms of the various airlines and their aircraft, and vice-versa, from the aircraft cockpit back to those airline computers.
VDLM2, which stands for VHF Data Link Mode 2, is similar in that it is a data transmission protocol that works over very high frequency (VHF) radio-waves, but it
