Something in the cockpit takes the crew's attention. The aircraft settles lower than anyone intends, then climbs away. The whole sequence lasts about ninety seconds and falls inside a single two-minute reporting interval. Afterwards, the record shows an aircraft holding a steady height. Two positions were reported and both were accurate, and the trail drawn between them joins them at a plausible altitude. The descent is nowhere in it.
Every point in that history is correct. There are only two of them, and ninety seconds of flying sits in the gap.
Most aircraft are already broadcasting their position far more often than that. ADS-B is the transponder signal that air traffic control and the public tracking sites pick up, and it updates as often as once or twice a second. At that rate, the descent above is described by dozens of positions rather than bracketed by two.
Merging that feed with the satellite tracking already on board is harder than adding one source to another, because ADS-B and GPS don't work out altitude the same way. Lay the streams over each other without accounting for that and the position reporting is unusable. ADS-B Fusion is the work TracPlus did to solve that: an algorithm that matches the two sources into one continuous telemetry record.
Because those ADS-B positions are fused with what the aircraft is already sending over satellite or cell, each report carries more than a bare ADS-B feed can. Height, heading, speed and operational events travel with it. A public tracking site shows you where an aircraft is. This shows you what it is doing.
Where ADS-B coverage exists, those extra observations fill in the movement. Turns read as turns instead of corners between dots, and a circuit looks like a circuit.
A second source in case the first one drops
Resolution is the obvious gain, but the quieter one is redundancy. ADS-B Fusion runs inside the TracPlus Mission Platform, which now has an independent second source of position to draw on. If the satellite link fails, ADS-B carries the record on. Nobody has to notice, and nobody has to do anything
On the day, and afterwards
While an operation is running, denser data changes what a flight follower can see: where an aircraft is, how fast it is going, which way it is heading, whether it is climbing or descending, all of it more current rather than inferred.
The same detail matters later. Formal incident investigations are rare. Proactive safety reviews are less rare, and they are only as good as the record underneath them. Pilots, crew and flight followers can open a history that reflects the flight moment by moment, and trust that what they are reading is what happened.
During an operation, denser position data makes aircraft movement easier to read. Afterwards, that same history carries the detail into review and reconstruction.
No new hardware
ADS-B Fusion is an optional feature. If an aircraft already has a compatible ADS-B transponder, there is nothing to fit and nothing new to learn. TracPlus matches the broadcast to the aircraft on its registration, so enabling it is a configuration change. The feed then arrives in the platform as another contributor to that aircraft's operational history, on the same map and in the same reports as everything else.
The aircraft was already flying the path. In most cases it was already broadcasting the data. ADS-B Fusion brings it into the operational record alongside the satellite and cellular tracking.TracPlus CEO Todd O'Hara describes the approach as starting with satellite and layering on whatever else the aircraft already produces.
“Iridium reaches pole to pole, which is why it's ideal for carrying the backbone of the record. That two-minute interval isn't a limit of the aircraft, it's where cost and coverage settle. Fusing in the other channels means the person on the ground can see updates every one to two seconds, not minutes. An incident commander doesn't need to know which channel any of it arrived on, only where the aircraft is and what it's doing."
- Todd O'Hara, TracPlus CEO
See it on your own fleet
If you want to see what ADS-B Fusion would add to the way you already track and review your flights, talk to your account manager or get in touch.
Three paths in. One operational trail out.
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