I was tracking a friend in N6637L who departed KCRQ on Saturday morning. He originally had filed to KPHX, which showed up on the “planned” flights portion. He then changed his destination to KDVT with clearance delivery on the ground just prior to departure.
As expected, a new flight plan appeared to KDVT, however there was no ETA given during the flight, and the flight did not appear on the “enroute to KDVT” section on the airport detail screen. However, it did appear on the “arrivals” column after arrival. (all other functionality, such as position reports worked fine.)
Is this the expected functionality, or would it be possible to clean up this behavior a bit?
I haven’t had a chance to check the logs yet, but I’d guess that the update to his flight plan changing the destination from PHX to DVT didn’t include an ETE or ETA. Without an ETA the flight won’t be listed on the enroute board for DVT, since we don’t know where to put it in the list.
So, if I understand correctly the ETA is based on the actual departure time and the ETE filed in the flight plan, NOT estimated by FAA computers based on current position, route and speed, then?
I think i depends on the situation. The FAA definitely sends time updates but I don’t know how they’re calculated. If there was never an ETA, we never received a ETA update from them.
We have technology in place to estimate ETAs but it currently only works on the most popular routes and aircraft types although we’ll be rolling it out further soon.
