So I tracked this for over 9 hours last night. It showed as I was feeding this to FA, but when you look at the “position only” information, none of my tracking information shows. Why is this?
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/HBAL170/history/20170810/1628Z/tracklog
This question comes up from time to time. Balloons are typically filtered out on flightaware.com because they exhibit unusual characteristics (primarily they tend to move really slowly). Our flight tracking engine has complex rules for determining what is and is not considered a trackable “flight” to make sense of all received data from all of our many data sources, including Mode S/ADS-B. (As you note, make sure you have “position-only” tracking enable in your FlightAware.com account since these flights are typically not on a schedule or flight plan.) We are continuing to make additional improvements to enable better tracking of position-only flights and have significantly increased the amount of position-only flights on the web site in the last year.
The one you linked to is unusual in that it was tracked continuously for about 10 days.
Thanks for the information. The entire flight shows now.
I’m curious how google retrieve’s their equipment
They have information about that on their Project Loon site, @usafpride…
Scroll to the bottom of this page:
https://x.company/loon/technology/
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I have been tracking HBAL 185 all day @ 60K ft. currently near tazwell , VA
I tracked the same balloon on August 19 as it crossed Michigan right around 60K occasionally dipping down to 57K. I had to do a lot of internet digging as I am new to all of this but did find the project loon site as well as finding out as near as I could tell that it was launched on August 10.
Me too, HBAL185 was the first Project Loon balloon tracked here at Smith Mountain Lake I’ve seen since I started.