There seems to be a bug in detecting the arrival time and flight duration for round robin flights. For example, when I looked up a flight of mine the on 14-jun-2007 in N9417L, it lists a departure time of 6:32pm, an arrival time of 6:40pm and a duration of 8 minutes. The departure time is correct, but the arrival time is definitely incorrect. We were in the air for a little over an hour doing practice instrument approaches at KAGC and KPIT. Also, the tracker map does not work properly for these round-robin flights as well.
I may be wrong, but the first thing that comes to my mind is that a controller sent an arrival message on your first approach.
In this flight, I departed KAGC, and my first approach was at KPIT. It was probably a good 20 min. before I did the first approach since we where arriving from the East, and the active approach was the ILS 10R so we had to go well past the airport to intercept the localizer.
Also, this is a flight school plane where we do many round robin flights for instrument training. All of the round robin flights for this plane and the other planes that I know about have the same problem listing durations of about 8 min.
This is a common issue for flights handled by local controllers instead of center. The arrival message was probably sent when you switched controllers.
The missing map is a known bug, when a flight has the same origin and destination and no position messages during the flight; with just 1 point to plot, the size of the map collapses to zero and confuses the map server.
So does this mean you only get position messages while aircraft are talking to center and not while talking to approach or departure? For most of this flight I was talking to Pittsburgh approach and was never handed off to center. Approach control has radar too. Why is this track data not available to you? Is this a technical or security issue?
Our feed comes from the national-level system at the FAA. If info about your flight doesn’t make it up that high (or to the particular system that our feed is from), we won’t know anything about that flight.
In general, if you’re talking to center we’ll probably get position messages; if you’re talking to an approach controller we may get position messages (odds seem to improve if you were previously talking to center).