Bold, italic Idents

FlightAware ADS-B Flight Tracking
1

I’m trying to figure out the UI meaning of bold, italic idents in the skyaware interface. I haven’t found a tooltip, and they don’t appear to be tied to a type of message source (ADS-B/UAT/MLAT/etc). “Newness” doesn’t seem to be a factor (i.e., we just newly saw this plane)… Anyone know?

image

Looking at N7840A, N37278, N901NN in the ADS-B section, most of the ones in the Mode-S section at the bottom.

ETA:
Took a better screen cap, sorted by message count. A bunch of them are bold italic across all data source types.

image
image932×574 55.4 KB

2

The bold italic indicates that the entry is an aircraft registration number.

3

What about those that are tail numbers, but not B/I? Like N9755D or N400CH in the second screencap?

4

I think the bold+italic means that the Ident and the Registration have not yet both been determined from the data received so far, so the missing info is temporarily populated from the other and the bold+italic added to highlight this state.

Once both the Ident and Registration have both been determined, the font returns to normal. They may end up still being the same text but now this is real data.

Hopefully someone from FA can advise if it’s more nuanced than that.

5

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.