How can you find out on FlightAware where a plane is coming from before your scheduled commercial flight?
At some low volume stations you can guess based on equipment type and reasonable turn times.
For something like this, you’d be better off going to the airport’s web page. Quite often they’ll have the gates of the arrival and departing flights. Just look for your flight and see which flight is listed as the arrival for that gate. This isn’t foolproof, however, because the inbound flight may be towed to another gate or taken out of service.
Continental makes it really easy. Go to their flight status page.
Checking COA392 on the flight status page yields the following information:
The flight departed EWR gate C71 at 5:10 p.m. (the scheduled departure time was 4:30 p.m.)
It arrived in MCO at 7:57 p.m. (scheduled time was 7:28 p.m.)
But the best information is yet to come, at least for airline geeks. Continental not only tells you where the outbound flight originated (in this case, MCO as COA293) but gives you the aircraft type AND the aircraft number (757-300, #853 in this case). If you know the aircraft number then you can find out the N number through several different sources.
I think that’s great that they give this information.
Wow, thank you. Your answer was extremely informative and told me what I needed to know!
A big atta-boy to, and aw-shucks from, David.