I saw someone mention in a thread recently that people who post asking “what was the plane I saw overhead at x” should search by selecting the map area to see what it was. Is this actually possible or is the person talking rubbish?
As far as I can see it is only possible to search by airport, ARCID, OPR or type. Is it possible to select an area of the map and that will then show all flights currently flying in that area? I would be interesting to learn how to do this if so as it would be very useful.
If it’s not currently available, any plans for it?
From the airport maps like flightaware.com/live/airport/KJAN if you put the cursor over the plane where it displays the flight data and then click on the plane icon, you can see the details of that plane overhead as the click will take you to the flight data page of that individual flight. Hope this answers your question above?
Now when I first looked at your link I thought “pah, that will only show me flights in and out of KJAN” but then I remembered that those are the blue planes and the overflights are the green ones!
My ‘requirements’ are different to other peoples as I track the planes on HF not VHF and my ‘area’ to listen to is the WATRS (West Atlantic Tracks Route System) area - basically the 3 points of the Bermuda Triangle - so there obviously isn’t an airport to select as it’s all water. However, with a bit of trickery with the map positioning and zoom button, I can select Bermuda airport and then zoom out from that which kind of works. It would be better if the expanded map was larger so that the green dots didn’t disappear altogether when zooming out far enough to see the whole area, but I realise that most normal people wouldn’t want a map of planes covering an area of several thousand square miles like I do . Would it be possible to offer an option for tracking larger areas, like ocean areas, where the dots are much more spread out? The maps only let you zoom out 3 times before all the dots are removed .
We could do that as a commerical project, but not available to the public. We’ve set the limit for the number of flights anyone can see to keep load on our servers reasonable.
OK thanks Mark. I can manage as is and certainly understand the server load concerns.
One thing that is rather annoying with the expanded map screen is the refresh rate is far too regular in my opinion. It refreshes around every 5-10 seconds which makes it virtually impossible to mouse-over the dots before the screen disappears and takes another 5 seconds to load up again. Every 30 seconds would surely be plenty fast enough?
No extensions, and the rate is increased, not reduced. I am just monitoring it now on a full page size expanded map and rather strangely it is now behaving itself and is refreshing after 90 seconds, but just prior to this it refreshed 3 times in quick succession (5 seconds between each) and then lasted for around 25-30 seconds before refreshing again and starting the 3 refreshes sequence again. This is usually what happens so it’s rather surprising to see it being ‘stable’ for a change.
. Would it be possible to offer an option for tracking larger areas, like ocean areas, where the dots are much more spread out? The maps only let you zoom out 3 times before all the dots are removed 
.