About Flying without a Flight Leader v0.4.152

What does this system do?

Flying without a Flight Leader (FOF) automatically detects takeoffs, landings and circuits at the airfield - from the transponder signal, from the glider trackers, and through a local AI that digitizes airfield radio: radio calls are converted to text in real time, registrations and actions are extracted from it and matched against the tracking sources.

The AI is trained on German and English airfield radio and runs directly on the box at the airfield - no cloud, no external servers, no data sharing. All three sources are merged into one consolidated digital logbook. Pilots add the legally required details (crew, passengers, flight type) via phone or tablet - the recording requirement per Sec. 70 (1) LuftVG is thus fulfilled without paper and without extra effort.

About the name

Yes, we know: “Flying without a Flight Leader” is the colloquial term. The legally correct term for the person who monitors circuit traffic at uncontrolled airfields is “Beauftragter für Luftaufsicht” (person in charge of air traffic supervision) (BfL) per Sec. 29 LuftVG or Sec. 17 LuftVO.

We still chose the pilot jargon - because that way every airfield operator, every club board member and every pilot immediately understands what it's about: the mode in which an airfield is operated without supervision on site. The legally clean term would be “mode of operation without an on-site person in charge of air traffic supervision” - but nobody wants to remember that.

Data sharing

This installation feeds its locally received ADS-B data into the adsb.fi- mesh network back - an open-data successor to ADSBExchange. In return we receive triangulated positions (MLAT mesh) for aircraft without their own ADS-B position transmission, which noticeably improves our detection rate.

adsb.fi is community-run and does not filter out military or VIP flights. Sharing can be disabled per box in the admin backend, but is recommended because it strengthens the whole mesh. More info: adsb.fi/feed-us-your-data.

Open Glider Network (OGN/FLARM): We consume OGN data via the global APRS stream as well as via our local FLARM receivers. Uploading our own FLARM reception into the OGN mesh is currently blocked by a bug in the closed-source ogn-decode component ( Issue #53 in the glidernet/ogn-rf repository) - once it's fixed we'll be contributing there too.

Operations & support

This system is operated by westküste UG, Contact: wim@westkueste.net.

For questions, bug reports or feature requests there is a Support form, which creates a ticket in our Plane project tracker.

© 2026 westküste UG · All rights reserved. The FOF system itself is proprietary.

Open source components used

FOF stands on the shoulders of many open source projects. The following components are directly integrated into this installation or used as a shared service:

The full license texts can be found in the linked repositories.