Usiing the GUI, I was able to easily connect the Raspberry Pi 1 to wifi and could surf the net w/o the Ethernet cable attached. However, when I plugged in the NooElec dongle it lit up, but I could not connect to Flight Aware. I reconnected to the Ethernet cable and the connection to Flight Aware returned. Must the wifi be connected in another way in order to connect to Flight Aware?
at least my raspi 2 (wheezy) connects to fa via ethernet or wifi with same settings without problems …
Thank you for your response. Newest P2 Model B, which I have tried, has a problem with power to the USB ports. As a result the “dongle” will not power up. There is a work around for the USB port problem, but it is too technical for me. Thank you again for your response. 
are you sure that your power-supply is strong enough? eg try a 2a apple for ipad. this is my model that works flawlessly:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
model name : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 38.40
Features : half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt vfpd32 lpae evtstrm
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x0
CPU part : 0xc07
CPU revision : 5
...
Hardware : BCM2709
Revision : a01041
Serial : 00000000xxxxxxxx