As someone with slight plane-spotterish tendencies who lives fairly close to a large airport, this website is manna from heaven for me. I know there have been Google Maps/flight mash-ups before, but this one (and the similar PlaneFinder) seems slicker, more detailed and more comprehensive. It’s cool that I can see a plane approaching my house on the map, its airline, type, destination etc. Click on the plane icon and you get a photo of the actual plane. Look out of the window, and there it is in real life.
I’ve also been fascinated by the approach patterns for Heathrow. At busy times, you can see the four stacks or holding patterns in operation, at four compass points around Greater London. You can set it so that you can see each plane’s speed and altitude on the map, so you get a really good idea of how traffic is handled.
I also like how the plane icons match the plane. If you zoom out so you’re looking at the whole of Europe, you can usually spot one of the small numbers of A380s currently in the service, thanks to the huge icon. You can also filter by plane or other criteria, so for example you can zoom right out and see all A380s in flight, anywhere in the world.
(The link above is centred on Heathrow, so if you’re looking at it when it’s the middle of the night, British time, you won’t see much. But it gets busy in the daytime.)
I decided to look at Seattle, near where I live. Either the app doesn’t have much coverage here, or 2:00 in the afternoon is totally dead. There are a few planes transiting (Dallas to Tokyo, that’s a long haul), but nothing landing or taking off.
Okay, it was showing me a Korean Airlines triple-7 that came in over Neah Bay, did a u-turn over Hood Canal, and was headed back out over the Pacific, but that must have been a mistake. Now that’s showing as Seattle-Seoul.
And I saw a mid-air collision on short final at Heathrow, but I think that was just a latency issue.
Yeah, unfortunately the US coverage doesn’t seem to be as good. Apparently these sites use something called ADS-B, which has not been universally adopted in the US. Or maybe I’m just looking at the wrong websites. I was interested in seeing the traffic around the really busy airports, O’Hare, Atlanta, etc., but there are hardly any planes on the map.
I think flightaware.com will show you anyone flying IFR or getting flight following in the US. So you’ll see more planes than just those that have ADS-B. Most planes, however, are doing neither and don’t even appear there.
I think Oregon went IFR briefly. About a half dozen “no callsign” blips showed up south of Portland for a while. I checked a while later and they were gone.
I looked up the IATA type designators on Wikipedia. I wanted to see if anyone was still flying L-1011s or 707s anywhere. Either there aren’t any, or I wasn’t using the filter correctly.
FlightAware seems to be pretty good as far as covering the entire world goes, but the website generally has a lot more bells and whistles and can take a long time to load depending on your connection.