Most FBO’s post their number of opperation per day and I understand that they factor in both VFR and IFR traffic. I have found that most FBO’s “Fib” about their actual opperations per day. Is their any way that Flight Aware could add a function in beyond the graphs were it shows the average opperations in and out of an airport a day to get a better sence of what the airport is really like?
While it’s possible for FBO’s to fib, there are a lot of flights that could easily get in and out of UNCONTROLLED airports without any type of FAA record.
I could fly from one UNcontrolled airport to another and no one would be the wiser, so how would you expect the charts to account for those kind of flights?
From what I have observed, the charts represent IFR arrival and departures. VFR flights are not recorded in the system like an IFR flight, so that flight to my knowledge doesn’t make the Flight Aware charts.
I was told (no real reference to it) that if a person is doing a touch and go at a controlled airport, that counts as an arrival and departure, so if one person does 7 touch and goes, then that counts toward the airport traffic count. The same could apply to an uncontrolled airport if somebody was sitting on the bench counting the take off and landings I guess???
My home base airport shows 147 operations per day. You can bet most are VFR flights and student flights with lots of touch and goes as the airport isn’t that big to handle 147 planes a day.
flightaware.com/resources/airpor … tilization
Allen
Back at my home airport, N14, about twice a year a guy from the NJ DOT came and placed a measuring device beside the runway to count operations. It’s basically a microphone attached to a computer that they leave there for a few days. It measures takeoffs only, since they’re louder. I asked him about our mowers cutting the grass next to the runway and he said they try to remove those erroneous records since the sound goes by much slower.