Filtering flight track glitches

FlightAware General
1

There will occasionally be erroneous glitches in the flight log which cause the flight track map to be screwed up. For example: today I flew from San Diego to San Jose IFR. The flight tracking map show the route nicely except for two lines going to Arkansas!

Here is a portion of the flight log:

03:07PM -121.28 36.63 127 8200
03:08PM -121.30 36.67 125 8200
03:08PM -80.60 33.05 119 3700 descending
03:08PM -121.32 36.67 131 8100 climbing
03:09PM -121.33 36.70 125 8000 descending

Notice the erroneous entry in the middle: wrong location and altitude.

Here’s a link to the flight:

flightaware.com/live/flight/N8BB … /KSEE/KRHV

The glitches are probably in the feed. Is FlightAware working on any filters to “reality check” the feed data to avoid problems like these?

Thanks.

-Jim

2

They say they are
discussions.flightaware.com/viewtopic.php?t=868

3

Thanks Brian. In that thread they talk about filtering altitude glitches only. The problem I describe is a position/location glitch.

One way to do it would be to look at each new track point as it comes across the stream, and discard it if it would involve supersonic speeds.

-Jim

4

I wonder if the filter would fix that position error too.

Also I’ve noticed supersonic speeds too:
discussions.flightaware.com/viewtopic.php?t=1252

5

I call this the curse of the 3 digit tail number. There was probably a VFR flight over in Arkansas and the controller only put the last three digits of the tail number in.

6

I have seen erroneous flights which can be attributed to the 3-digit tail number curse (one shows up in my log of flights, where my aircraft becomes a Mitsubishi MU-2 twin!).

However, the particular case I’m referring to here is exactly two spurious radar hits mixed in with the rest of the track data of the last flight - the aircraft type doesn’t change.

A simple filter based on speed would easily eliminate these invalid track points.

7

I suspect those two points were actual hits for a VFR flight in Arkansas. The controller either corrected the tail number after a few minutes or flight following was cancelled.