A global positioning instrument on the airplane tracks its exact location and altitude, and that data is combined to give elevations accurate to within six inches, said Bryan J. Logan, chief executive of EarthData International, the company that is collecting the data.
He's been featured on tracks with Bruno Mars and Janelle Monae, as well as having Eminem and Paramore's Hayley Williams on his own "Airplanes" track.
In the book the bad guys use an airplane to track Hannay across the Scottish countryside, a radical notion at the time.
"It's crazy because I never thought that 'Airplanes,' " the track with Ms. Williams, "and 'Nothin' on You,' the whole 'Adventures of Bobby Ray' project was going to cross over as much as it has," he said.
Globalstar can deliver Internet links to airplanes and track data on trucks, ships, pipelines and railcars.
For tracking airplanes farther away, say in midflight, the lag stretches out to 36 seconds.
It's the kind of grand plan that would only really work at scale, but in the U.S., Tile's home market, the company has already seen a few success stories – like that of a man who lost his keys on an airplane, and eventually tracked them down when the plane landed in Orlando.
(From "Airplane!" of course).
GRAND FORKS, N.D. — On the pilot's computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway here, the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.
