Acarsdrama.com is an aviation enthusiast website that automatically transcribes radio messages originating from aircraft using various distributed sensors around the world. These messages continuously aggregated and pushed to various online feeds. One popular way to ingest ACARS is via the Fediverse through an openly available Mastodon/glitch service.

At the time of writing, the service has over 1,800 followers and 93,000 messages posted. Users of the service from around the world are being greeted with the following error message this morning while visiting the site:

According to their latest tweet, the project is on hold due to a “legal threat”:

Quoting the server’s about page:

“ACARS is a 1970’s era protocol that is used in Aviation to this day, to pass messages over radio waves.

The transmissions happen in-the-clear (i.e. are not encrypted), which means that anyone in the vicinity can receive them with the right hardware and software (which is very readily available and costs about $30).

This instance made possible by a group of volunteers around the world who have set up distributed collectors of these messages, which are then forwarded onto our drama engine and checked for the presence of drama.

Most ACARS messages are extremely boring and routine things – which, to be honest, is part of the ‘joke’ of ACARS Drama. The site, https://acarsdrama.com has an overview of the project, and has info about how you can contribute as well.

We love aviation. We love planes. We love pilots. And we are nerds. That is why we are all here. Nothing on ACARS Drama is designed to hurt or embarrass anyone. Our privacy policy lists some of the ways we filter content to ensure that anything that could be identifiable or have a safety impact is filtered out of the feed.”