originating? we don t have any real answers with all of this, but we have a lot of ideas that are worth talking about here because it is such a mystery. every plane that s in the sky is emanating a tremendous amount of information about itself. largely through the acars system. most of the time that s going out through vhf radio when it s over land it goes through a radio tower. if it moves out over the water, if it s further out where it can t quite reach those land stations, then this plane will connect through a satellite and that satellite in turn will send that signal down to a ground station of some sort. now, what sort of information are they collecting? it may be information about how the engines are performing, about how much fuel is being burned or a simple message from the captain. we ve been flying and someone says they have gate information, that may come in through this same system. a simple readout. they may have information if something goes wrong with the