Tracking a civil flight asks Planespotters for that aircraft's photo, once
per aircraft, straight from the browser. The CONTEXT panel's CONTACTS view
shows it under the flight's name with the photographer's credit, as a plain
link to the photo's page. Only images on plnspttrs.net and pages on
www.planespotters.net are ever shown or linked. Military aircraft and a
converted TR-3B are never looked up.
Flight lookups (type, route, photo) whose source failed temporarily are
asked again after a 60-second cool-down; an answer, found or not, and a
permanent refusal stay final for the session. A route belongs to the
callsign it was looked up for, so a callsign change drops the old route.
Browser QA scripts that track a flight answer the photo lookup themselves,
so they never call the third party.
The flight, military and vessel feeds were named after the providers the
bundled server uses (/api/opensky, /api/adsblol/mil, /api/ais-live and
their track routes; createOpenSkySource, createAdsbLolSource,
createAisStreamSource). Any server should be able to answer a feed from
its own provider, so the feeds are now:
/api/flights /api/flights/track?icao24=
/api/military /api/military/track?hex=
/api/vessels /api/vessels/track?mmsi=
with createFlightSource, createMilitarySource and createVesselSource. The
old routes are removed. Each server names its provider in X-Feed-Source
(the bundled server sends OpenSky Network, adsb.lol and AISStream, so its
attribution is unchanged) and the military feed's cache state and age in
X-Feed-Cache and X-Feed-Age-Ms. Sources report the provider the server
names and fall back to the feed's name.
Sameh Khamis