I use flight aware, more or less the same concept. Just today I was walking to class and saw a nice private jet pretty low, and in 30 seconds I had all the flight details.

We have a few airports around me, my campus is only a few minutes from our main intl airport, but the one I spend time at is the smaller, more “local” airport. That’s where the jet was heading, a Cessna Citation CJ3.

But yeah I love aviation, these sights fascinate me (:

i use that app to check inbound flights if i'm swapping planes, that's a great app.

another tool is if you ask siri, "what flights are overhead", she'll give you a list of what's in your vicinity.

and in google, a quick way to look up a specific flight is to type in the 2 letter identifier of the airline and the number and it'll pull up it's status. i.e. american airlines 421, AA421. most 2 letter identifiers are common sense-ish. delta is DL, united is UA.

and worthless trivia, southwest is WN. rumor has it when southwest was submitting their papers during startup the letters SW were already taken by some other carrier. so, the story goes, someone asked colleen barrett, who was at that time herb kelleher's secretary, either, who is your favorite musician or what is all y'alls second choice, something to this effect. the end result is that WN came from the fact that she really liked willie nelson. no idea of the accuracy of this, but i think it's a good rumor to keep going.

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ΜΟΛΩΝ-ΛΑΒΕ
we're doomed

cool website.

FYI you forgot a "T" in flight, so your link leads to a bad website. Don't click on any of the links...

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My training

I drive my husband nuts every time I see a 747 overhead. (Given that it was my office for the better part of 20 years). I have to look and see if it’s cargo or passenger. Even in the skies above Seattle you don’t see too many.

Thanks for the heads up. Sorry to all those who followed a bad link. It is corrected.

I need to forget what I just saw on that site.

One odd one on a Delta flight - 5 flight attendants got sick on a flight.

It's a neat page.

We live inside a landing pattern for evening flights and one night I got out of the car to get groceries and a plane flew about 1,000 feet high over me and I thought, hmmm I wonder if that is my wife's plane landing. Sure enough, i checked the app and I could have waved to her.

Been using this site for years to track our plane when my partner flies it. I track my Dad in his plane and my son when he is flying Dad's plane. My wife uses it to verify I 'made it' to my destination when I am travelling on business. I travelled commercial in December up to PA and was sitting in Harrisburg waiting on a flight that was late. The gate people told us the plane was '10 minutes' out from the airport and apologized for the delay. I was sitting there on wifi with my iPad, so I pulled up the app and located the inbound flight. It was over 300 miles away! So, I walked up to the desk when there were no passengers around and showed the location of the flight to the gate agent. I asked him, 'Is this the flight?' I already knew the answer, but he looked at the flight number and said, 'Yep, that's it.' I told him it's about 300 miles away and would not be landing in 10 minutes. 'Oh, shit!' He shortly corrected the time estimate for arrival with all of the waiting passengers. Just for kicks, I decided to track it all of the way to the runway to see how much latency there was in the location on the iPad. It was no more than about 5 seconds. Blew my mind it was that short given that the full ATC radar sweep is around 12 seconds, if I remember correctly. The program does have predictive flight path algorithims, though. Sometimes, you will see a plane move laterally when approaching or departing an airport due to a turn that hasn't been picked up by the actual radar sweep and the algorithim assumes the plane is continuing on the same heading.

It's fun to zoom out and see the massive number of airliners headed east to Europe from the northeastern US every evening around 9-10PM. A buddy of mine flies A330s to London and back regularly and occasionally I look up his flight.

Greg

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If you are a Canuck that engages in gratuitous bashing of the US, you are probably on my Iggy List. So, save your self a bunch of typing a response unless you also feel the need to gratuitously bash me. If so, have fun.
"Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f___ things up" - Barack Obama, 2020

We live under a Flight path from a major airport. We have some crazy neighbors that complain (one that lives on AIRPORT RD- which you think would have clued them in before buying the house). But I love sitting in the hot tub and watching the planes fly over.

That story never gets old. I still love to listen to it even though it has been around for many years. Awesome.

I met a Sled driver once out in west Texas at a National Championship glider meet, of all places. Fascinating to talk to, but that's another story and I don't want to hijack this thread.

Greg

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If you are a Canuck that engages in gratuitous bashing of the US, you are probably on my Iggy List. So, save your self a bunch of typing a response unless you also feel the need to gratuitously bash me. If so, have fun.
"Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f___ things up" - Barack Obama, 2020

Go for it. This thread has run its course - give it some life if you have the time.

Well, okay. Kind of funny, really.

This was back in the late 80's or very early 90's and I was in Littlefield, TX for the National Gliding Championships. We had a couple of rain days in a row and so everyone was just milling around the huge hangar they were keeping the tow planes in. Small groups of pilots from all over the country and some from other countries talking airplanes, gliders, and all sorts of crap out of boredom. I found myself in a small group standing next to a guy in an Air Force issued flight jacket, but didn't think much of it. Lots of glider pilots were military retirees. In the course of casual conversation, someone asked him if he could tell us anything about his last mission? He kind of smirked and said, 'Not really...' My Dad was a retired AF pilot and so, of course, I had to ask him what he flew. When he told me, I have to admit, I was more or less starstruck. As you know, the Blackbird is just The Shit. I had read numerous books and was simply fascinated by this aircraft and the incredible amount of brain power that went into solving previously unsolvable problems associated with ultra high speed flight. Now, I am standing next to a pilot of this fantastic aircraft out of a science fiction novel that I had read at least four books about and a thousand times I wondered about this or that while drinking in technical details. But, at this moment, I can't think of a single question. Nothing. Nothing but, 'This is a cool moment.' After a long pause, I finally thought of something. Like a 10 year old kid, I said, "What is the coolest thing about flying the SR-71?" Several in the group got a chuckle at my expense, but he looked at me as if he had been asked that question many times before. Or, he had asked himself. Regardless, he had an answer.

When the SR-71 is on a mission, a critical aspect is coordination with multiple tankers because a Blackbird can drink a full fuel load in less than an hour and a half. When it's time to refuel, they have to descend from around 80,000' down to around 35,000' depending on how heavy the tanker is. After taking on fuel, this guy told me they would back off from the tanker slightly before banking left and clearing the sky in front of them. On the occasion that an SR might be in hostile territory and get tracked by a SAM, there was a little mirror at the top of the canopy right where it came to a point. The mirror was the bottom part of a small periscope that allowed the pilot to have a view down the backbone of the aircraft and know if a SAM was on his tail. The pilot could extend and retract this little device as needed. This guy told me he almost never used it for that, though. He said the best use of that periscope came after a night time refueling track and he had to return from 35,000' to 80'000', his operational altitude. The jet drinks prodigious amounts of fuel 'down low', so it was important to waste no time getting back up where the plane was made to fly. As soon as possible, he told me he would flip the periscope up and ease the throttles forward to the stops while pitching the nose up. As the nose came up and the plane began accelerating from 350 kts. back to 1,900 kts. in a steep climb angle, he would look in the mirror at two blue streaks of glowing exhaust gases emanating from the tailpipes of two of the most powerful jet engines ever produced. These streaks of still burning gases extended 40-50 yards from the aircraft. He told me that when he looked at that and felt his body being pushed back in the seat aimed at a star filled sky, That was The Coolest Thing about flying the SR-71.

No fucking shit.

Greg

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If you are a Canuck that engages in gratuitous bashing of the US, you are probably on my Iggy List. So, save your self a bunch of typing a response unless you also feel the need to gratuitously bash me. If so, have fun.
"Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f___ things up" - Barack Obama, 2020

That is a great story. Thanks for taking the time to share it.