https://www.lisbonfinals.com/log.html2026-09-06T01:20:00+01:00https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-06-fifteen-lines-across-three-reports-we-d-write-differently-now.html2026-09-06T01:20:00+01:00

Every monthly report has a "Loud Daytime Events" table, an informational ranking, no ANAC threshold attached since daytime noise isn't regulated. Went back through June, July and August after spotting the pattern in June's table. Fifteen entries across the three, five in June (EZ

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-06-blind-for-90-minutes-and-how-we-found-out.html2026-09-06T00:07:00+01:00

At 20:25 tonight the station went blind. The USB cable feeding the ADS-B receiver failed mid-read, and the port it plugs into couldn't get the device talking again no matter how many times the system tried on its own, 176 attempts and counting by the time anyone looked. No ADS-B

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-05-the-bigger-we-get-the-harder-we-look-for-our-own-glitches.html2026-09-05T14:30:00+01:00

Lisbon Finals is averaging around 330 flights a day now. Over 41,000 logged since May 3. That number used to feel abstract. This week it stopped being abstract, because 330 chances a day to measure something correctly is also 330 chances a day to measure something wrong. We caugh

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-05-so-which-one-s-louder-now-you-can-just-ask.html2026-09-05T00:15:00+01:00

Wanted this since the first month of data, and a reader named Paulo reminded me to actually build it: a page where you pick two aircraft models, or two airlines, and put them head to head. Flights tracked, average noise, the loudest pass either one has ever recorded, how hard the

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-04-the-number-with-no-category.html2026-09-04T18:48:00+01:00

Yesterday's fix was about a word I couldn't verify. Today's was about a number that had nowhere to go. While rebuilding the night tables, I found a flight at 97 dB, 1.9 dB under the absolute Red limit, that the classifier didn't touch. Not Red, and Yellow tops out at 95.9 dB, so

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-03-someone-actually-read-the-anac-website.html2026-09-03T17:37:00+01:00

Nuno wrote in again today, and this one stung a little more than the time-window mix-up last time. He'd gone and actually read the ANAC regulations, page by page, and worked out that the airport's night quota system allows up to 26 movements a day within the restricted window, as

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-03-five-people-wrote-in-and-i-was-wrong-twice.html2026-09-03T15:08:00+01:00

Today started with a bug report that turned into an audit. José pointed out that the reports called the runway "03/21" — a designation that hasn't been correct for years. I checked the official AIP chart, and he was right: it's RWY 02/20. Not just a typo in one place, it was bake

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-02-the-pitch-that-landed.html2026-09-02T12:23:00+01:00

Back on August 18th, Diana Rodrigues from Euronews slid into the project's Instagram DMs. A week later, on the 25th, I pitched her the wider story — not just one terrace counting planes, but the start of something bigger, a network of comparable European airports waiting to be me

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-09-01-the-captain-wasn-t-flying-alone-today.html2026-09-01T20:57:00+01:00

August's report went out today, but not before it got a real second opinion for the first time — not a proofread, an actual audit. It caught the report quietly repeating a line that used to be true and wasn't anymore: "100% of night violations are arrivals," copied month after mo

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-08-24-a-few-loose-threads-tied-and-one-new-question.html2026-08-24T19:16:00+01:00

A quieter stretch behind the scenes, mostly things nobody was meant to notice going wrong in the first place. The Archive had been quietly serving the same stale snapshot for over a week without anyone catching it — the kind of failure that looks like success from a distance. Fix

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-08-17-looking-for-a-co-pilot.html2026-08-17T10:57:00+01:00

For a while now, "the network" has been something we talked about but couldn't point to. That changed this week: host-a-node.html is live, the front door for anyone who wants to run a station of their own, somewhere else, under their own flight path. It lays out what that actuall

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-08-14-someone-finally-asked-why.html2026-08-14T20:34:00+01:00

Two quiet weeks on the terrace. A handful of small fixes along the way, nothing worth its own entry, the pipeline just kept running. No major issues, no crashes, no gaps in the data. Then a journalist showed up. Tatiana Martins from Mensagem de Lisboa came to see the station in p

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-08-01-july-s-report-is-live-and-we-caught-it-repeating-a-lie.html2026-08-01T19:37:00+01:00

10,450 flights in July, up 8.5% from June. Average noise 92.9 dB. Loudest reading of the month: 122.3 dB, TAP Air Portugal, July 3rd. The full report — every airline, every violation, every hour of the day — is up now. While building it, went back to check a line the report has q

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-07-22-the-archive-opens.html2026-07-22T10:55:00+01:00

For weeks this station has kept a memory nobody outside could see. The public site always showed the present moment clearly — the live ticker, today's flights, running totals since day one — but there was no way to explore any of it, no way to cross-reference, no way to look back

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-07-20-behind-the-scenes-at-the-station.html2026-07-20T20:32:00+01:00

While the planes kept rolling in over the terrace these past few days, we've been busy building something backstage: a brand new tool that lets us dig through the station's entire history — not just the last 30 days shown on the site. The result: we can now ask questions we simpl

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-07-14-the-reports-that-vanished-and-a-journalist-who-didn-t.html2026-07-14T02:06:00+01:00

Started the week fixing something nobody was supposed to notice: the daily reel had been quietly undercounting flights. Two rotations of the same aircraft, same hex code, different approach. The dedup logic saw one ICAO and merged them into a single flight. The public dashboard w

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-07-03-a-lot-happened-this-week-not-all-of-it-on-purpose.html2026-07-03T02:59:00+01:00

Six hours of silence, and nothing in the logs to explain it. That's how this week started. Turned out two parts of the system were racing to write the same settings file — main.py and the admin panel, both innocent, both guilty. The listening window quietly collapsed to 7.5 secon

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-06-30-the-numbers-don-t-lie-neither-does-the-camera.html2026-06-30T18:01:00+01:00

Ran the numbers today. 82.3% of photos scoring 4.0★ or above. Compared to 15% back in May. I didn't change the sky. I didn't change the planes. I changed the algorithm — and apparently that was enough. The gallery on the front page now scrolls on its own. Nine photos, gliding lef

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-06-28-loudest-flight-of-june-124-1-db.html2026-06-28T11:00:00+01:00

EZY75QC, an easyJet Airbus A320, set the June record on the 25th at 19:04, registering 124.1 dB at 1,050 ft on final approach. That's the highest reading this station has ever recorded on a commercial narrow-body. The runner-up that same evening: RYR95FC (Ryanair 737-800) at 120.

https://www.lisbonfinals.com/journal/2026-06-28-the-camera-that-moved-in-the-night.html2026-06-28T10:59:00+01:00

Woke up to zero captures. The Reolink TrackMix had silently pivoted away from the approach path sometime around 21:03 last night — its AI tracking triggered on something (a bird? a reflection?) and the PTZ never found its way back to the preset. No code change, no config drift. P