I live in the chicagoland area and deal with O’Hare and Midway airports a lot, plus the surronding ones. These are some major airports and handle a lot of flights a day. When i want to view the flights departing lets say Lewis (KLOT), i see those airplanes plus all of the ones coming into and leaving the other airports which makes the map really cluttered. I request a feature so that when i click on a map for a certain airport i only see those flights coming into and out of that airport, i dont want all the clutter from the airports.
We’re working on some configuration options for the maps that will accomodate that request as well as automatic detection of nearby major airports that have relevant traffic or if that traffic is overwhelming, etc.
I think, on the expanded activity map, that the green/blue color coding is quite adequate. However, sometimes even the expanded map is so crowded that ID boxes are hidden. A mouse-hover pop-up ID box would be greatly appreciated so that every mapped plane could be identified.
Daniel, do you think we’ll ever be able to post flight tracks from two different aircraft on top of each other? Also, post their track co-ordinates side-by-side?
I know you don’t have flight data on these particular flights, but something similar could happen in US air space and it would be interesting to look at how close the radar put the planes together at the moment of near-collision.
I know it’s not in development or on the road map. At this point, that feature would only show a 2D view and could misrepresent any verticial separation. Certainly if there’s an event like that in the US, we could manually produce some special 3D image to represent the data similar to this image that the San Diego Union-Tribune made a few days ago.
Congratulations to FA for its credit as a “Source” to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Also, the U-T has a couple of very talented graphic artists on its staff.
Here’s my ‘fantasy’ wish for flight tracking maps: To have a ‘layer’ that could be superimposed that would show tracks of all aircraft within ‘x’ miles and ‘y’ thousand vertical feet, in real flight time, of the plane being tracked (where ‘x’ and ‘y’ are user-defined).
I know … not in development nor on the road map. But it sure would be fun to see. Realistically, I imagine it would be incredibly CPU-intensive. One can still wish for it, though.
