Sunday, October 29, 2006
BEST Flight Tracking Website
The BEST flight tracking website for domestic flight in the U.S. is called FlightAware. Check 'er out at: flightaware.com.
Not only does this great website provide the same nifty diagram showing where the plane is enroute, it provides a ton of other information you're not going to get elsewhere. I recommend registering with the website (it's free), as it gives you access to some additional gadgets.
One great feature of FlightAware is that you can find out when a flight you're planning to take actually departs and arrives. For example, let's say you're planning to take US Airways (USA) flight 749 from Philadelphia (PHL) to Las Vegas (LAS). The flight is set to depart PHL at 8:30 p.m. and is supposed to arrive LAS at 10:30 p.m. You want to meet your buddies at the airport, who are coming in from California at about the same time.
One of the great tools that pops up on a FlightAware flight search is called an "Activity Log," which shows the actual departure and arrival time of this flight for the previous ten days or more. And if you look at the Activity Log for USA 749, you see that it almost never departs on time. Most often the flight departs at 9:00 p.m. or later--more than 30 minutes late. Armed with this valuable information, you could tell your friends who are meeting you at LAS to just go along to the hotel without you, because you know you're going to be late as hell.
A lot of the other great features of this website are pretty geeky, but pretty fun to play around with.
- You can look at the altitude, speed, flight path, scheduled and actual flight duration and the filed flight plan for all commercial flights and for many private planes.
- You can search for all flights between any two cities (just be sure to type a 'K' before the airport code for U.S. airports--so searching for SFO on this website would be KSFO)
- In addition to looking at specific flights, you can also look at the activity at any given airport too see all the arrivals, departures, and scheduled arrivals and departures.
- And if you're a real airplane geek, there's a feature that allows you to search for all airplanes in U.S. airspace of a particular type. For example, if you want to know about every 777-300 that's in the air, you could search for it, and you'd get a result that looked like this:
And for international flights, try Aeroseek. It's also got some pretty cool tools.
Enjoy!
Comments:
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Hold it right there. Just one damn minute.
Do you mean to tell me that if I am meeting my buddies in Vegas and I am going to run late (because FlightAware told me so), that I should let the other guys start partying WITHOUT ME? I don't think so!
If they were REAL friends, they might head on to the casino on their own, but at least they'd pay for a HOT LAS VEGAS HOOKER to meet me at the airport and accompany me to my hotel. I mean, come on, what kind of guys would abandon their friend in this fashion?
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Do you mean to tell me that if I am meeting my buddies in Vegas and I am going to run late (because FlightAware told me so), that I should let the other guys start partying WITHOUT ME? I don't think so!
If they were REAL friends, they might head on to the casino on their own, but at least they'd pay for a HOT LAS VEGAS HOOKER to meet me at the airport and accompany me to my hotel. I mean, come on, what kind of guys would abandon their friend in this fashion?
# posted by 
: 4:20 PM
: 4:20 PM << Home
