We have multiple aircraft we query flight tracks for every 5 minutes. This has mostly been working fine for the last few months, but last week and today one of our aircraft starting getting tracks from one of our other aircraft for a while and then snap back to the correct location.
Our aircraft N440EH was getting N441FS tracks from 13:58 to 14:06 UTC today (8/28/2017). Last week we had this issue for a few hours worth of flight (not sure which aircraft were involved).
We are running the queries in very quick succession. For each tail number we first run FlightInfoEx(TailNum, 1, 0) and then SearchBirdseyePositions(query, false, 100, 0) where query is {= fp " + flightInfoStruct.flights[0].faFlightID + "} {> clock LastLoggedEventTime }
Below is a graphical representation of the problem. You can see the grey tracks shoot over to the orange.
Just to clarify, the position records returned sometimes have a faFlightID value that is for a different flight than the one you requested in the query argument?
Can you provide the specific faFlightID that you were searching for at the time?
This happened again last week and we were able to screenshot the flightaware track as it was happening. You can see we are looking at 440EH, but the tracks are for 441FS. It even says ‘Operating as 441FS’ on the page.
I took a quick look and the ADS-B data looks fine. The FAA flightplan data looks suspect; for the KSUS - KDSM flight it claimed idents of both N440EH and N441FS at different times.
Has this occurred on more than one flight? It’s more likely just a verbal mixup of what the pilot is saying and what ATC is hearing, though generally the pilot will notice and correct ATC when they are reading back the wrong ident in the acknowledgements.
