Searching for Archer

Down the "non ICAO" hex rabbit hole near KSNS

Fans of the EVTOL startup Archer recently posted a video on Reddit of what they think is an Archer aircraft flying. For me, this would be huge if true - every now and again I see “blips” from Archer aircraft; as though they were turned on and back off again. They often have garbage data, like no lat/long, or the speed is 0.7 kts the whole time, or they’ll suddenly show up at 80,000 feet and disappear again (which isn’t that uncommon for Aalto Haps, come to think of it)

Rumour has it that Archer flies with their ADSB disabled, which means that they’ll show up as a “non ICAO” hex code in the ADSB tracking. Apparently, when you fly dark, what happens is that ground radar publish your activity on ADSB networks on “temporary” (non ICAO registered) hex codes. Most ADSB networks show these prefixed with the ~ (tlide) character.

So I went through the video nearly frame by frame, and grabbed all the non ICAO hex codes I could find, and I decided to see what I could do about visualizing the flight.