bellingcat / bellingcat/toolkit

Tool suggestion: Wingbits TCAS Alerts - searchable log of collision-avoidance advisories

Open Beginner friendly
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Dominant language
JavaScript
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Description

Disclosure first: I work at Wingbits, so this is a submission of our own tool.

Name: Wingbits TCAS Alerts
URL: https://wingbits.com/tcas
Category: Transport
Cost: Free. No account, no sign-up, no rate limit on the page.

What it does

A running log of TCAS resolution advisories detected across the Wingbits ADS-B receiver network. A resolution advisory is the point where an aircraft’s collision avoidance system stops warning the crew and starts issuing a command, so each row marks a real loss of separation rather than a near-miss estimated after the fact.

Each entry gives the timestamp, the aircraft that received the advisory (callsign and ICAO hex), the aircraft identified as the threat, the coordinates, and how long the advisory lasted. Any row opens on the map.

The table filters by date range, callsign, ICAO hex, and a latitude/longitude bounding box, which is the part that makes it usable for research: you can ask what happened over a given area between two dates without knowing which aircraft to look for.

Why it might belong in the toolkit

The Transport category covers position tracking well already (ADS-B Exchange, OpenSky, Flightradar24, FlightAware). None of them surfaces TCAS events as a searchable dataset. Air-proximity incidents are otherwise only available through national investigation bodies, months later, and only where a report was filed.

Limits worth stating in any entry

Coverage follows the receiver footprint. Absence of alerts in a region means no receivers, not a quiet sky. Detection depends on the aircraft downlinking the advisory, so the log undercounts.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Review the toolkit's existing Transport entries and contribution conventions before adding Wingbits TCAS Alerts. Include the supplied URL, searchable TCAS alert details, coverage limitations, and free/no-sign-up information; done means the tool is represented accurately in the appropriate toolkit entry.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
content, documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
68/100

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