Two weeks ago the station moved into its new 3D-printed home. Time for a check-in.
The short version: it holds. The station has now run for two weeks without a single restart, clock change included. Since 25 October it has recorded 4,127 flights, around 300 a day, and taken 2,584 photos.
The hour that happened twice. On the night of 24 to 25 October, Portugal went back to winter time and 01:00 came round twice. The microphone did not care, but three pieces of our software did. One cut the 25-hour day short and lost the last flights of the evening. Another made the Live page show zero flights after 23:00. A third published the daily reel twice, and would have skipped it entirely next March, when 01:00 simply does not exist. All three now follow the real Lisbon clock. We will check again on 28 March.
Knowing who is flying. A flight landing as Etihad was labelled Air Algérie, because the aircraft, leased from Hi Fly, once flew for them. Two recent TAP A321neo were missing from every public database, so almost 300 of their flights had no registration. Both are fixed, and we changed the rule behind them: the callsign the aircraft broadcasts now comes first, before any registry guess. More than 170 past flights were corrected along the way. One easyJet A320 remains a ghost: it does not broadcast its position at all. We hear it, but we cannot name it.
An honest October report. The October noise report is out, with a measurement note: from 13 to 23 October a faulty microphone cable made some peaks read a few decibels low. We did not invent a correction. We flagged it.
Grey skies. Under a heavy grey sky, an aircraft seen from below is almost black. Our photo selector took these for backlit silhouettes and kept them off the website, so on 6 November only one daytime photo out of 174 made it. The planes were sharp and well framed, simply dark. The selector now knows the difference between a grey sky and the sun behind the aircraft, and if a day still comes up short, the website shows the best photos of that day anyway. Just in time: rain is on the way.
The station is built to run on its own: remote access, an automatic restart after a power cut, and a spare memory card ready. So far, it has not needed any of it.
Station Captain