Visualizing Personal Flight Data With OpenFlights.org

An anonymous reader points out this "series of personal flight data visualizations, created from data collected through OpenFlights.org. The visualizations show key transport hubs (airports and countries) and the routes between them, for all flights taken by a friend of mine over the past 10+ years." What I wish this included: Indiana Jones-style red-dot animation showing the travel path over a spinning globe.

Pretty cool, but not for pilots

[mumblestheclown]

Kind of cool I guess, though not really suitable for 'flight logging" from a pilot perspective. More like a cool piece of social media stuff. Still, for people who use social media, I guess it's cool.

For what it's worth, I'm a pilot and use Safelog / PilotLog.com to log my flights. It's not OSS and is payware, but it's an impressive piece of software engineering in that it works well accross multiple platforms (I use their web-based system, mac client, and android client) and has a ton of useful features that I found that 'free' pilot log systems lacked completely. It does something vaguely similar in its map view of logged flights - you can specify to draw thicker lines and change displayed airport icon size based on visit frequency, though I rarely use this option as a simple map with uniform lines is interesting enough.

Flightradar24

[photonic]

Neat plots, but I find the real-time and historic plots of actual GPS tracks shown at Flightradar24 [flightradar24.com] much more fascinating. Most European flights have an ADS-B [wikipedia.org] transponder on board, which basically is a radio beacon that transmits a GPS position. These signals can be received by anyone with a cheap USB receiver [amazon.com] over a few 100 km. For these planes, the position is plotted online with a delay of only 10 seconds or so. American planes seem to lagging behind with adoption of this system. I can watch this site for hours to see what airplane flies over my house, to see how airplane are holding in case of bad weather, to see when I have to pick up friends from the airport, ...

Maps are fun

[spaceyhackerlady]

I find maps endlessly fascinating. I routinely access FlightAware [flightaware.com] for information on commercial flights I've taken, then visualize the route in Google Maps.

When I flew to visit family over Christmas I got the flight plans (and later tracking data) from FlightAware and drew maps with the results, though "CYVR V347 GARRE SEATN J534 CYWL" may not mean much if you're not a pilot.

On a night flight back from Dallas (via Phoenix) in October I solved a mystery with FlightAware and Google Maps. At one point we flew just east of a prominent city with several obvious suburbs. Way off in the distance was a very large urban area, right on the horizon. My first thought was Salt Lake City, but that was way east of the great circle route. I knew we were west of the great circle route to avoid the restricted airspace north of Las Vegas (including R-4808N, i.e. Area 51). I had made a note of the time of the Big City, so I got tracking data from FlightAware, figured out how far the horizon was at our cruising altitude, fed the results in to Google Maps and found that the city was Reno, while the lights off in the distance were the central valley of California, from Sacramento down to Stockton.

...laura