The "Idiots Guide" to ADS-B community drama

The community asked why airplanes.live was created and what the vision is for the future; this page attempts to provide backstory and goals. The final part of this page was penned by a member of the community.

TLDR: Until January of 2023, ADS-B Exchange was the leader of community-driven ADS-B sites. After it was sold to a private equity firm by Dan Streufert, the ADS-B community began developing alternative sites designed to support the community as a whole without the profit driven greed that ruined ADSBexchange. Today, the community driven spirit is alive and well at airplanes.live. Read on to find out the details leading up to the airplanes.live launch.

Part 1: The sale of the community - Jan 25, 2023

Dan Streufert, the sole owner of ADS-B Exchange, sold ADSBx to JETNET (owned and controlled by private equity firm Silversmith Capital Partners). Dan Steufert's act of betrayal is a slap in the face to all of the volunteers and developers that actually made ADSBx function, as well as a number of feeders who wanted no part of sending data to a profit driven business owned by a private equity firm.

The tracking community is only seen as sheep to extract profit from, Silversmith/JETNET only wants data to increase their profit and EBITDA multiple. Full stop. The truth is the private equity firm will sell JETNET and the community to another investor, that means new owners could shut it down or enable blocking and filtering, thus removing the public good benefits of it.

Many feeders dropped off ADSBx immediately, others waited until there was somewhere else to point their feeds. In the wake of the sale a few new sites popped up.

The developers were working with some of the original team that departed from ADSBx. Those that disagreed with the unscrupulous sale of ADSBx made it clear that the intent and vision was to facilitate the creation of an entity that would not be owned by a single person and could not betray the community in the future. As time progressed, James helped push to get feeders to adsb.fi as the primary placeholder site. The impression at the time was that adsb.one, owned by husky, was being used as more of a development sandbox and there wasn't a huge push to encourage the community to coalesce and feed there as the community dedicated alternative.

Part 2: The Finland departure - Sept 11, 2023

On September 11, 2023 (of all days) Samuli (tmannti), owner of adsb.fi, announced he was no longer interested in the new organization. The developers had been working since January to put together (airplanes.live). Samuli was also no longer working with the team or even cooperating at a basic level. It turned out that Samuli locked both James and Husky out of the server he controlled, revoked their access to Cloudflare, then proceeded to spam members of the ADS-B community Discord server. He was banned from the server for spamming but continued to spam friend requests via DM. Samuli even posted a “statement” on reddit bashing James, which seems to be at least partially, if not completely, inaccurate.

Husky and James continued to fund adsb.fi’s infrastructure per their prior commitments until Samuli changed the DNS and removed the data from the community API and tracking maps. Samuli has perpetuated the mostly false and manipulative reddit statement.

As noted in the airplanes.live public announcement, Husky et all had not yet planned to launch airplanes.live officially for another couple of months but the abrupt departure of Samuli from the project and his childish behavior forced their hands. They brought the information to the community in an effort to be transparent and to retain momentum for a true community site (rather than yet another site under the control of a single individual).

Part 3: Legal troubles are public for ADSBx/JETNET - Sept 11, 2023

Amid – but entirely separate from! – the confusion and discussion of the other nonsense, a filing for a lawsuit against JETNET, Dan Streufert, and ADSBx was made public. This filing lays out the lawsuit by Golden Hammer Ops - the developers of ADSBx infrastucture from 2019 on – alleging theft/transfer of intellectual property after the sale of ADSBx and multiple violations of both the California and US Criminal Code.

Read the court filing (PDF): ADSBexchange JETNET Dan Struefert sued for alleged IP theft

Forward: A view from a long term community member

The departure of Samuli from the team is very disappointing for many because we have been actively promoting it. As a mediocre photographer, I would post on social media and link to the guides and the github to try to get feeders.

It is frustrating that all of those that chose to ditch ADSBx and feed to the other sites now have to once again make changes to our feeders but if we all work together and help out, this will be the last time. The website airplanes.live is what the team was working on. Anyone who was active and paying attention in Discord knew it would eventually come.

Be patient as the team continues to build out airplanes.live, the site was not ready to launch, and there is a lot of work to be done. Husky has stated that adsb.one will remain up until the transition is complete as resource until airplanes.live is running smoothly.

A new, community-accountable site is the first step to meeting the goals set by the original developers in the immediate aftermath of Part 1. The goal was an entity that is not owned or controlled by one person that can sell out the community.

A quote from Husky: "airplanes.live is owned by the company we created, and does not have a sole owner. Hopefully in the near future, we have 3 additional people that will be joining."