About an hour after i posted I found an inbound flight over NB near an airport I had already unlocked, so it became easy-peasy.
Thanks for the tip, though. Africa has been unproductive for me; Johannesburg was very disappointing even trying at different times of the day.
There really isn’t one hub that unlocks the whole continent. In a way, though, the scarcity of flights limits where you have to search to find them.
Go to Google and type “international flights to Burkina Faso”, and the AI will tell you what airport in Burkina Faso handles the incoming flights (make a note of its three-letter identifier), and what are the common departure points (make a note of those too, there won’t be many). Then go to flightaware.com, use their flight finder tool, and enter the departure and arrival city. Make a note of the departure time, and go back to the app at that time, and look for that plane taking off.
I’m finding the best luck today from Paris, Istanbul, Addis Ababa, and Casablanca, but the flights will still be few and far between. There was one golden window around 5:20 where there were three flights out of Casablanca to countries I didn’t have. There were delays, so I had to visit twice to get all three.
Did you happen to catch a flight to St. Helena while you were there? I think there’s only one flight per week that goes to St. Helena, and it leaves from Johannesburg on Saturday morning.
No, I wasn’t so lucky. Oddly, my perception was that there were 3x more inbound flights than outbound, which even if true was probably related to the time of day. Also, quite a few flights outbound or overflying did not have a destination listed, even though they were larger aircraft, which is frustrating.
On a different note: I had read numerous reports that going from level 29 to 30 would be a slog, but I had no idea it would be this bad. At my current rate, I’d guess another 6 to 9 months from my current 29.3 level.
Finally today’s daily missions are reasonable. If you are like me and have gotten out of the habit of even checking them, it is probably worth giving these a shot.
I stayed up later than I should have to catch a flight from Addis Ababa to the Central African Republic. Flightaware showed it leaving the gate a few minutes early. It took more than a half hour to taxi. I saw it briefly in SkyCards, so I travelled to Addis, but the it disappeared before I could catch it. I thought it may have aborted the takeoff and would try again, but it never did.
I just did a news search; nothing about a plane crashing in Addis Ababa.
Still a good night; I picked up three more countries. If anyone is still looking, Addis Ababa in the morning (their time) seemed to have a fair number of flights to other African countries.
Everyone else here probably already has this, but I tried to catch a flight from New Zealand to Antarctica last night. Unfortunately it turned its transponder off and didn’t turn it back on until the return journey, so no luck there.
I traveled to a new airport this week and used some of the tips from up thread and picked a smaller airport next to ATL in Atlanta. The amount of air traffic in this area is crazy! People keep throwing up blue skies too and I’m getting incredibly spoiled.
However after spending some time the first day, there are times now where I’ll check and not a single new aircraft or destination is available.
Can I travel back and forth to my physical location for free, or do I have to unlock an airport near me?
When you click Leave, you are always returned to your physical location, no charge.
I happen to live in the Atlanta metro area, so…yay me?
Good to know, thanks!
To add to what @Raza said, you can swap between any of the airports you’ve unlocked that week. Click on the map and select Travel for Free.
What might be less obvious is you can get this list from Profile → Airport Weekly Tasks. Then click on an airport, click on Map, and Travel for Free. It’s an easier way to jump around if you have unlocked a bunch of airports that week.
With this technique and the 30 minutes for 75 coins, you can complete as many weekly tasks as you want. It’s trivial to collect more that 75 coins at a busy airport in 30 minutes. You’re only limited by the time you want to put in.
No new aircraft types, but certainly new aircraft. Click on an aircraft and the game shows its type, origin, destination, fleet, and registration number. If the registration says “new”, you haven’t caught that particular plane before.
There’s a trophy for catching 1,000 different Delta aircraft. You could make a dent on that with some time at Atlanta, as well banking some coins.
I’m wary of some of those airline fleet trophies. I’d be pissed if I put in the effort to collect 999 out of 1000, but will never see the 1000th because the wet lease ended or they sent an aircraft to the boneyard and FR24 hadn’t caught up with their records yet 
There are a lot of ways for airplanes to remain in an airline’s possession for months after they’ve flown their last flight. I don’t know anything about how FR24 maintains their records and from what sources.
Delta has more than 1,000 planes in their fleet, that’s just a round number to get the trophy. I got the trophy for 1,000 American planes weeks ago, and I still find new ones. I have more than 1,200 now. I expect the new ones will get scarcer and scarcer, but I’ll probably never get their whole fleet.
I do wonder if the heavy-lift and speed trophies are achievable. Is anybody flying an F-4 anymore?
The long-haul trophy can not be completed at the moment. One of the routes (Perth to London, I think) is suspended because of the hostilities around Iran.
I believe Turkey and Greece still fly F-4Es. Iran as well but I doubt they have ADSB transponders on them…
I just looked it up. As of wiki’s last update Delta has 1004, American has 1030, and United is #1 with 1127. All that is mainline only, not counting RJs flown by affiliates. By contrast Southwest, the next largest US carrier, has 803.
All of these number fluctuate a little bit, but the trend is generally upwards, at least until the next financial or political crisis.
So getting 1000 “real” Delta, not RJs, is getting darn close to 100% of them.
That is super helpful, thanks! It can be a bit of a pain trying to move the map across the country.
Also good to know - I didn’t realize there were trophies for that because of the goofy naming convention they’ve used and I just never bothered to click on them. But does this then make completing future weekly tasks difficult as you’ve already caught a ton of the planes?
No it doesn’t. You can catch planes once for each flight. So even if you have caught a specific plane, you can catch it again when it lands and takes off again.
Okay I see where you can catch them again later but it does not count towards the 1,000 plane per company trophy.
Has anyone else had issues with the game not remembering that you’ve already unlocked a particular airport? Three days in a row it marked LGA as “new” even though I actually unlocked that airport my first day playing.