Stevem7 wrote:
Here's an example. Emirates Air Flt 221 left Dubai at 2:42 on 4/8/12. About 20 mins after pushback the flight was reported in the air by Emirates Air on their web site. It flew 8000 plus miles. When I went to bed you guys knew the flight had pushed back from the gate at 2:42 and had it taxiing at the airport for over 3 and a half hours. So obviously there was some reporting. When I woke up in the morning the flight was two hours from DFW. You guys showed it as having two hours left, that it had flown almost 5000 miles and was going to do a little over 3000 statute miles in the next two hours which we both know wasn't going to happen. I can understand planes over the Middle East not having a good reporting system but from Greenland on in to the USA there are plenty of checkpoints and it makes no sense to me that a plane that had been in the area of the Continental US for almost 4 hours could not be seen by you folks. What am I missing?
I don't think the Emirates site differentiates between left gate and left runway; as soon as it pushes the flight becomes "In flight". When they tell us it leaves the gate we mark it as taxiing and we wait for some other confirmation it's in the air.
Emirates is a new airline for us and it looks like some flights are having issues. They're not sending a reliable wheels up indicator, and due to the delay of entering US airspace it's not matching to the right day's flight. I'll forward this example to the development team.