Durations Suspect on Activity?

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL860

Are the durations correct on the Activity screen? It seems fast - 4hours HNL to ATL.

Looks like the flight is being marked as ended when it reaches the west coast. Rather odd, since plenty off west coast to Hawaii flights show the correct duration. We’ll look into it.

Still doing it.

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/DAL860

It looks like the problem began on Feb 9.

Sorry to bump this thread up again, but why does the tracking stop a little short on Mainland Hawaii flights? (See: flightaware.com/live/flight/AAL162). Any explanation as to why this happens?
Thanks!

On some flights, it seems totally random when it says it arrives. For example, for COA15, most days it runs the full 10 or so hours, but then it is as little as 2 hours on others.

I guess the easiest way to answer your question on why international flights don’t track all the way from the destination airport is becuase the FAA computers don’t track it that far. All US flights on here presumably use the FAA host computers for the information.

The FAA’s computers don’t pick up the flight plans until they are passing the first fix outside US airspace. A specific example: At Boston Center, every time an international flight comes in from Canada… the Canadian sector calls us on the landline and gives us an estimate to the first fix on the US flight plan. We then depart the aircraft in the system from that fix at that time.

On here, flights seem to sometimes track via the FAA computers,and sometimes they must track via the ICAO computers which track it all the way.

-DM
ZBW

With these Hawaii flights you’re seeing a few variations on the same bug in the FAA’s feed to us. Events like crossing the Canadian border, crossing the Pacific shoreline, and entering Hawaiian approach airspace generate a spurious arrival message; when we add more intelligence to the feed parsing code we’ll include something to try to detect these glitches.

I’m new here so am having difficulty getting my head around the math of travel time plus time-zones let alone what the traveller must be experiencing with jet lag, etc.

ACA15 from Pearson in Toronto to Hong Kong. Actual departure 26 minutes after posted, scheduled arrival plus delay…actual arrival time 15 minutes beyond that…bingo! makes sense. However, posted arrival date not Day plus 1.

Tracking flight at 3 hours before arrival, noticed flight was about 1/2 hour ahead of schedule (suspect west to east tail winds), but actual arrival delay probably due to stacking (?). I’m not a pilot nor frequent traveller. The tracking map is confusing for a layperson. Great site!

FlightAware is very unreliable for international flights since we only receive data for flights in and around the United States, so the data you’re seeing is likely inaccurate.

That probably clears up a lot of confusion. :slight_smile:

Daniel, aren’t you throwing out the baby with the bathwater re reliability of international flights? Certainly, time data at the foreign airport is questionable. Certainly, there is no map track out of U.S. ATC space. However, when the flight is inside US ATC space, the map track and time data at the U.S. airport are reliable, are they not??