So I just set up my first feeder station in Southeast Michigan. I saw a plane being tracked with MLAT that had an unusual label so I wanted to find out some more information and went to flight page for the aircraft. The plane was showing up in Central Michigan Northeast of Lansing on my SkyAware page, but on the Flight information page, it said it was over the ocean between Cuba and Mexico. The aircraft in question is PICO55.
The flightpage is showing a flight from March 2022 and the Skyaware page is live viewing.
My guess would be that your are looking at 2 different moments in time where one has the actual registration live and the other one is historical data.
This is pretty common when looking at MLAT flights, especially military flights that are using a previous callsign. From what I’ve seen, there’s a delay before the FlightAware database is able to configure a flight without a flight plan and so it just defaults to the previously recorded flight.
You’ll also see registration-only flights where there’s no tracking available. Here’s one my ADS-B is tracking now:
And then there are the aircraft that the owner/operator asks FlightAware to not publish. You’ll see a message stating so when you click on those flights.
