Plane-ly amazing!

November 4, 2005 6:23 PM

Looking for detailed flight info? This site takes airplane flight tracking to air traffic control levels. Be sure to check out the complete airport status and the facinating flight movies.
posted by neurodoc (38 comments total)

It's amazing how complete this site is. For example, here's Prince Charles and Camilla's plane (currently en-route to San Francisco).
posted by neurodoc at 6:28 PM on November 4, 2005

This is good.
posted by swift at 6:36 PM on November 4, 2005

Perhaps you can ask the founder odinsdream. I wasn't able to find any useful information about where the information comes from. This is amazing though.
posted by panoptican at 6:45 PM on November 4, 2005

This is so cool, I'm losing control of the left side of my body.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:49 PM on November 4, 2005

Wow. A terrorist's wet dream. All we need is Google Maps hybridization.
posted by Rothko at 6:51 PM on November 4, 2005

A few years ago, on a VIP tour of an FAA regional center, I had an opportunity to see the FAA's own interactive, international aggregator. It was a vector-graphics workstation that showed a similar North American diagram with a cloud of dots, and a light pen allowed you to zoom in, change overlays (e.g. weather, time zones, FAA regions) and ultimately click down to every single live flight across the US, Canada, and Europe, with some limited information available for flights outside of that airspace.

The FlightAware site obviously exists probably primarily to serve the planespotting community -- it isn't that much more useful than the airlines' own sites. But the data exists and certain parts of it are public -- e.g. scheduled arrival times. The FAQ suggests they aren't accessing the real-time flight data the way the FAA computer could, just showing an estimate of where in its path an airplane will be, based on departure and arrival information.

"Where it's coming from" is most likely, in my estimation, the same information interfaces that your travel agent would use.
posted by dhartung at 6:52 PM on November 4, 2005

"A terrorist's wet dream."

Why?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:57 PM on November 4, 2005

"The FAQ suggests they aren't accessing the real-time flight data the way the FAA computer could, just showing an estimate of where in its path an airplane will be, based on departure and arrival information."

Oh. That's a big disappointment.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 6:59 PM on November 4, 2005

"A terrorist's wet dream."

Why?

It's like the Farmer's Almanac but for super destructive planes!
posted by panoptican at 7:00 PM on November 4, 2005

This is amazing.
posted by spock at 7:01 PM on November 4, 2005

"A terrorist's wet dream."

Why?

You can scratch the screen with a voodoo pin.
posted by StickyCarpet at 7:01 PM on November 4, 2005

Cool website, and good post. Thanks. But aside from allowing you to browse through flights, is the actual tracking feature any different than what you get with Apple's Flight Tracker Widget? That's always worked well for me.
posted by cribcage at 7:32 PM on November 4, 2005

neat, I like this, especially that animated little clip showing a days worth of flights
posted by edgeways at 7:44 PM on November 4, 2005

That is sooooo neat.
It's times like these that I totally love the internets.
posted by Jon-o at 7:51 PM on November 4, 2005

There's more than meets the eye here. It seems they must have access to flight plans filed by both commercial and private pilots, otherwise, how could they know what each flight's route is? And how could they know, for example, how high and how fast someone like Mr. Eric Janssen is flying?
posted by greatgefilte at 8:21 PM on November 4, 2005

greatgefilte, it's tracking everyone using an IFR (instrument) flight plan. There are tons of charter and private planes, something I've never seen on a flight tracking site.
posted by letitrain at 9:11 PM on November 4, 2005

HOLY FLORKING SCHNIT!
posted by quonsar at 9:14 PM on November 4, 2005

"The FAQ suggests they aren't accessing the real-time flight data the way the FAA computer could, just showing an estimate of where in its path an airplane will be, based on departure and arrival information."

Considering that a small number of those planes are in northern areas where there isn't radar coverage (and where IFR controllers still calculate time estimates -- scary stuff), that looks to be correct.
posted by dreamsign at 9:49 PM on November 4, 2005

So most of this is actually real-time?
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 9:57 PM on November 4, 2005

Well, after being a MeFi member for three years, I'm glad I was able to make my first FPP an enjoyable one!
posted by neurodoc at 10:56 PM on November 4, 2005

"A terrorist's wet dream."

Why?



Be the first person in your neighborhood to own a Tennis Ball Gun / Tennis Ball Cannon !!
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 11:20 PM on November 4, 2005

Back when we had that contest, I was wondering why you were up against dios. Now I understand.

Back when we had that contest, I was wondering why some people had no sense of humor about it. Now I understand.
posted by Rothko at 11:24 PM on November 4, 2005

The number of trans-oceanic flights was the most amazing thing to me with the animation. The sheer number of flights everywhere is really sort of breathtaking.

I wonder how much fuel the aviation industry uses in a day, and I wonder how that compares to our daily automobile usage.
posted by Ynoxas at 12:03 AM on November 5, 2005

I was struck by how much quonsar's link looked like this.
posted by the_bone at 12:35 AM on November 5, 2005

For Ynoxas:


posted by Heywood Mogroot at 12:38 AM on November 5, 2005

A terrorist's wet dream.

Not in the UK. Repeat for any UK airport...

This airport is outside of FlightAware's service area and will only show data on flights to/from FlightAware's service area and be generally unreliable.

Refreshingly honest.
posted by lagavulin at 2:18 AM on November 5, 2005

Heywood, that's an interesting chart. What's the source?
posted by gwint at 5:29 AM on November 5, 2005

Thank you Heywood. I'm really quite surprised air and heavy vehicles (semi's ?) are not more. Goes to show the incredible penetration of automobiles I guess.
posted by Ynoxas at 5:56 AM on November 5, 2005

Heywood, that's an interesting chart. What's the source?

http://images.google.com/images?q=us+oil+use+for+transportation

Kind of surprised that that office hasn't been completely defunded, being as how they hate America and all.
posted by intermod at 6:31 AM on November 5, 2005

lagavulin: [Nice whisky, btw...] Yeah, Spain's "outside the area" too... Americo-centric web-apps are so 1997.
posted by benzo8 at 8:28 AM on November 5, 2005

The chart is a screenshot from the DOE's "Freedom Car" pdf ca. 2002.

Note that they forecast ~3B bbl/year oil production over the next 20 years while in 2004 the DOE has said the US only has 22B bbl of proveable reserves. Guess ca. 2010 we'll start recycling gasoline or something...
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 10:41 AM on November 5, 2005

LOL. The DOE site with this image is timing out now.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 10:46 AM on November 5, 2005

I'm really quite surprised air and heavy vehicles (semi's ?) are not more. Goes to show the incredible penetration of automobiles I guess.

i found the chart confusing. is the oil usage of the various transportation modes represented by the thickness of the bands, or thier placement in the stack?

at first i read it as Ynoxas does, but it looks like what it says is that in 1970, cars accounted for 1 to 4 billion barrels, while air consumed 7 to 7.5 billion.
posted by quonsar at 11:06 AM on November 5, 2005

quonsar: you'll figure it out.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 11:26 AM on November 5, 2005

quonsar:

It's a stacked area graph, so each individual component only represents itself, while all together they represent the total usage.

So, at the vertical line, cars are about 5 million barrels, and air travel is about 2 million barrels... but in the aggregate, all usage equals about 13 million in total.

This type of graph allows easy comparison of different components of a whole. So, just visually, you can see that for instance Marine usage is a very small portion of the whole. Also, note how car usage has very modest growth, while light truck (SUV?) usage is what really blossoms in the projected future.
posted by Ynoxas at 12:54 PM on November 5, 2005

Regarding that chart, I wonder why they are predicting a slight bulge in consumption by light trucks and heavy vehicles around 2010.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:11 PM on November 5, 2005

just a guess, but looking at the 2010 frame of a US population pyramid animation, there is a baby boom echo that arrives in the 15-24 age group in 2010.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 1:35 PM on November 5, 2005

I think this is cooler... just a bunch more visualizations...
posted by mhh5 at 11:39 PM on November 5, 2005