You made me laugh out loud at a feature that I had not discovered before. You have made lots of improvements to mouse-hover tool tips, but I noticed one on the page for a specific aircraft that is the funniest.
If you let the mouse hover over the registration or flight number on this page, the tool tip gives you the phonetic pronunciation of the number. I.e. for N5943U, the tool tip says: “november fife niner four three uniform”. Now I thought it was funny that it popped up anything at all, but when I noticed the “fife” and the “niner” I had to pick myself up of the floor! You guys crack me up!
The street address is cute, too. Somebody is bound to ask for it if you didn’t already have it in there.
While on the subject of the tool tips, I really do like the one where I get the city and state when I hover over an airport name. An airport’s location isn’t always apparent by its name. Something’s wrong with KILN, though. Apparently don’t have the city/state in your database, never pops up anything. Neither do airports outside of the US, but I really don’t care about them.
We have a new airport database for US airports that we’re going to be bringing online soon, but like you mentioned, it won’t have any impact on the missing cities for the international airports.
I agree that it is sometimes unclear where an airport is based on the name alone. Most flight tracking sites list purely city names “e.g., LOS ANGELES to ATLANTA” although of course FlightAware has vastly more flights and by including private flights that don’t exclusively travel to/from the major airports, we sort of have to accept that sacrifice. I think it’s preferable to risk the confusion (and with the hover pop-up or click-for-more-info) than to clutter the screen with both airport names and city names.
I noticed the “fife” and the “niner” I had to pick myself up of the floor! You guys crack me up!
The official ICAO Phonetics for the numbers 5 and 9 are fife and niner, per paragraph 2-4-16, table 2-4-1, of FAA Order 7110.65, Air Traffic Controlhttp://www.faa.gov/ATpubs/ATC/ATC.pdf). However, what’s strange is that table is the only mention of “fife.” All examples in the following section (2-4-17) regarding number usage uses five, not fife.
I think he “got it” completely and was just amused by the attention to detail although it does say three, instead of tree, which I think might be the technically correct way.
A question on your new (US) airport database, Daniel…
Will the database accomodate manual editing? If so, then we could submit pm’s to you with cities where there are none listed and someone at FA could edit the database as new data arrives. Surely someone knows just where in Ohio KILN is listed. Also applicable to Mexican airports and small airstrips in the US like 3F10. Maybe that could also resolve situations where the FA database finds a code used by FA is ‘not a valid airport’.
It’s possible although we prefer to just present manipulated data rather than edit it – I don’t think we’re going to have any missing cities when we have the new data online, so hopefully we won’t have to face that issue.
…but you all missed one. 3 is actually spelled out as “tree”.
There’s a GREAT exchange btwn the FAMOUS “Boston John” and a COA pilot on liveatc.net
COA802 (I think was flight no): Boston Tower, with you for 33L
TWR: COA802, Boston Tower good afternoon. Wind tree zero zero at tree runway tree tree left cleared to land.
COA802: Clear to land 33L that’s a lot of trees down there.
TWR: The foliage is beautiful this time of the year.
…this time of the year happens to be mid-JANUARY when this took place. I doubt there’s any bit of foliage on the trees…that’s a FAST mind though there at Boston Tower.
