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Watching the Skies with FlightAware.com
By Dave Peterson | May 16, 2008
Ever wanted to have an air traffic controller’s view of your local airport (without the sense of lives riding on your every move)? Then FlightAware.com might be just the thing for you. It’s a flight tracker that goes way beyond the basics of arrivals, departures, and where a single plane is in its flight path.
Here’s a detail of a view showing traffic around San Francisco International:
Flights shown in blue are arriving or departing at KSFO, flights in green are passing through the area. The data blocks next to some planes display airline, flight number, aircraft type, altitude, whether the plane is rising or descending, air speed, and the departing and arriving airports. For example, the block just below the KSFO label depicts Southwest Airlines Flight 1978, a Boeing 737-300, at 8,400 feet and rising, doing 96 knots. It’s leaving San Francisco International bound for Los Angeles International. Not all flights on the screen display data blocks at all times for readability reasons; a future enhancement promises a zoom feature that will allow enough separation between planes on the map for each one to have data.
For aviation enthusiasts, it’s certainly interesting to watch traffic around a given airport, but that’s just the beginning of the ways FlightAware’s data can be viewed. The flight tracker can search by flight or tail number, airline, airport, or aircraft type. Search by Boeing 737 to see the sky choked with the world’s best-selling airliner.
The major limitation of the system is that its data comes from the US Federal Aviation Administration. That means it works great for flights confined within the domestic United States, but when aircraft leave FAA tracking, they fall off the map. But for flights beginning and ending within the United States, and for a detailed look at traffic surrounding US airports, is an exceptionally interesting and useful site.
Topics: Web |