Live Flight Tracking

I downloaded google-earth and they have a deal with fboweb where they are starting to integrate the flight tracker into the earth map, so far showing arrivals into only 3 major airports. I was looking at flights into ORD from western Europe and the funny thing is that they are showing up on google-earth long before flightaware (or even FBOweb!) has them. For example, Cargolux 778 started from ELLX heading to KORD, when I came online the plane was shown off the coast of Belgium heading over the North Sea, and the icon has moved in what seems to be real-time to where it is over the UK near Northumberland at 30,000. But that flight isn't even on flightaware! when I type in CLX778 I see yesterdays flight!

Usually flight trackers aren't able to "see" a flight till it is off the coast of the UK in the atlantic and even then the tracking doesnt become real-time till its over north america. So why is google-earth able to show a flight all the way over in Europe? And its not just CLX778, all of the American and United flights from France, UK, and Germany are shown long before they even get to the Atlantic!

bruce

UK tracking data is available to flight tracking providers on the condition that it is not revealed to individuals unless they have proved that they conduct flight operations in the UK. If anyone is distributing it, it is in violation of their agreement with the FAA and the UK.

I dont know how they do it when none of the flight trackers that I know of do it. very strange.

bruce

Bruce, how did you know that the aircraft you were watching on Google Earth was CLX778 ?

Well, right next to the icon it said "CLX778" and when i clicked on the icon, it said what the altitude and speed was. Why, are you saying that it may not have been what it was tagged as?

This was earlier today, round noon-ish CST. I followed that one all day - it dropped off the screen for a brief time after it entered the Atlantic track but then picked back up again east of Iceland and all the way to runway 27L at O'hare. but I first saw it just off the coast of Belgium.

bruce

So let me get this straight - Google Earth are now doing flight tracking, including the UK?

I have Google Earth already installed. Please provide the link that makes these flights show up with tracking tags.

no, it is a special thing. They are partnering with FBOweb and working on integrating FBOweb's flight tracking onto the google-earth. So far at this point, only arrivals are being shown into only 3 U.S. airports - LAX, ORD, and BOS. those are your only choices. arrivals only. But eventually I think all of FBOweb is going to be online at google-earth, and that is not worldwide but only flights into/out of the USA.

Here is the special page to go to and select which one you want to see:

http://www.fboweb.com/antest/ge/intro.aspx

Those links don't work for me... I get "Fetch of NetworkLink failed: Http: Not Acceptable" when Google Earth tries to open them.

The google earth interface is open and public, so I don't think there's any "partnering" -- they're just exporting data to the program. There was actually a FlightAware/Google Earth thing a few weeks ago that showed all flights that someone on the internet wrote. It was pretty cool to play with for a few minutes . . . but what's the point? Seems like having a huge 3d windows program to track a flight is kind of overkill.

hmmmm.....that's interesting. I just tried all 3 of them and they work fine by me. I dont know what could be wrong...

bruce

The links don't work like they should for me either. When I click the links I get a download box appear. When it does its stuff it opens up Dreamweaver MX on my machine and plants a load of web script in the design window, bizarrely.

Bizarre? You guys must be new to fbo web!!

I've been with FBOweb for years, but I'm close to cancelling.