One of the local news stations linked to flightaware for the Nike Gulfstream that had its landing gear stuck.
Thats rocks! Anyone have the ATC from that flight!?
FlightAware got a bit of air time today as well an incredible spike in traffic during the flight’s final hour. Since then, we’ve been offering additional content to the press including an animation of the flight route that aired on some local news stations.
I hope you got lots of attention to FlightAware! The .mov Movie is really cool and gives a perspective that the landing video couldn’t.
So THAT’S what a holding pattern is supposed to look like… then he starts making a bunch of passes at the airport. We pilots can imagine what was going on in the pilot’s mind during all of that!
For the benefit of those who haven’t seen the video, check:
news10.net/storyfull3.aspx?storyid=14326
Sums it all up when you see the first guy out of the plane talking on his cell phone. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was talking to his wife or his lawyer, but you can guarantee it was one of the two!
…Bruce
That movie is great! Is there anything in the works to have animated flight-path “movies” for normal flights?
bruce
Quicktime animations like the one for N225GV and the day-of-traffic require a certain amount of manual effort (although it is theoretically scriptable), a Mac, and nontrivial processing overhead… so, for the time being, they’ll be more for special events.
That being said, however, we have done some proof-of-concept animated GIFs that are quite promising and fully automatable.
You will definitely be seeing more animations, more often, and in more places, as we continue to make FlightAware the reference standard by which all other flight trackers will be judged and found wanting. 
Karl
PS – Thanks for the feedback! Whatever else is going on, we’re also having an incredible amount of fun.
Well its great to see that flightaware jumped onto this “incident” with the tracking log & movie in order to get the site some mainstream media attention. Imagine if you had such a movie back when Jetblue had to circle LAX… there’s a huge demand for those kind of stories (news outlets covered it non-stop) and flightaware can be right there as a part of it. Its great exposure for a young site like this.
bruce
Really cool site! 8)
THANK YOU! To those providing all this info for aviation buffs! 