Catching the Queen ✈️
Tracking Zsolt Szüle & Sniffing the Data Trail
If you are an aviation enthusiast in Hungary, the name Zsolt Szüle must be familiar to you. He is arguably every Hungarian’s favorite B747-8f pilot - currently Commander at Silkway West Airlines.
Earlier yesterday, I got a heads-up via his Facebook post that he was about to fly the Queen of the Skies from Baku to Amsterdam, with a flight path taking him right over Budapest following waypoints from BUDOP to BEGLA.
Normally, I’d just look up, but this was the perfect opportunity to stress-test my newly installed Flightradar24 (FR24) feeder.
The Setup & The Hunt
My humble ADS-B setup isn’t exactly military-grade yet; I’ve got a range of about ~70 kms. This meant I didn’t have all day—I had a very narrow time window to catch the signal as the 747 roared overhead.
Using the provided flight plan, I estimated his arrival time above Budapest and grabbed the call sign from an online database. Then, the waiting game began. I opened my feeder’s auto-refreshing dump page, eyes glued to the tracked database.
Right on schedule, the 4-engine giant pinged my receiver.
It appeared on my tracked aircraft list immediately. Success!
Following the Digital Breadcrumbs
Seeing the plane on my dashboard was cool, but I wanted to verify what was happening “under the hood.” My feeder’s stat page confirmed I was tracking flights and connected to the Flightradar24 servers.
But I also wanted to see the data flow myself. I opened up ntopng - the Ferrari of traffic analyzers - to see what is leaving my home. I filtered for my feeder’s local IP address and—boom—the flow was suddenly visible.
I could see my feeder holding a single, active connection, communicating busily with a Swedish IP address: 185.218.24.23.
A quick whois lookup on that IP confirmed the destination: 185.218.24.0/24 belongs to Flightradar24 AB.
(I have to admit, I was relieved to confirm it was actually FR24 and my feeder hadn’t just joined some random botnet 😂 ).
The Verdict
The big question remained: I was sending data, but were they using it?
I hopped onto the global Flightradar24 map and applied a custom filter to show only aircraft being tracked by my specific Radar ID. And there it was.
Although the heavy cloud cover over Budapest hid the physical aircraft from my eyes, my little antenna pierced right through the grey. I picked up Captain Szüle’s signal, verified the network packets leaving my home, and put the Queen on the map.
Mission accomplished. 💪