Good afternoon Flightaware,
I have a suggestion which you may wish to take into consideration. I have used this website incessantly in my flying career as a flight planning aid as well as flight tracking, and I cannot thank you enough for helping countless pilot’s like myself in their daily routines. However, I wish to bring to your attention a small detail which could easily be improved.
I fly a lot, both as a pilot and passenger, and thus I track flights and look up airline flight plans several times a day on my laptop computer. As I am often in a rush, I wish I could just type in the ICAO or IATA code of the departure and arrival airport on the home page, and quickly be taken to the list of flights between the two locations.
However, the way you have programmed your website, if I quickly type in the four letter code to the “origin” box an autofill suggests the closest city name to the four letters I have typed and automatically does a search for that. For example if I type in “KMIA” [tab] “KLAX” [enter], the search is processed for “Kenai Muni (PAEN)” to “Klawock (PAKW)”. I understand it may be a bit more user friendly to novice enthusiasts to have the origin/destination box autofill the city name; but let’s be honest, if someone has the expertise to want FlightAware as a resource they probably know the ICAO code for the airports.
I imagine I am not the only aviator who finds the autofill feature a huge annoyance. Since a majority of the time I use FlightAware I’m connected via a laptop with a crappy touchpad (no mouse) and am almost always in a hurry, this seemingly small detail would save a lot of frustration to those of us with careers in the industry.
I greatly appreciate your time.
Very Respectfully,
C/1st LT William Loyd
United States Air Force