FlightAware is absolutely great - I love it, well done on building a great product.
Possibly more for the aviation enthusiast, I was thinking what a powerful marriage FlightAware could be with Microsoft Flight Simulator. Although MS Flight Simulator has “AI aircraft”, they never run to correct schedules.
I am guessing that replicating all aircraft would be very difficult. Another way to think about it would be that Flight Simulator could give a visual depiction of the tracking of a single flight or a single aircraft being tracked on FlightAware.
It would be fantastic to mesh the two together. Flight Sim with the “real” current traffic. We already do it with the current weather. And the VATSIM community handles Position feeds for live simulator traffic on the web already, along with Live ATC voice and/or text communications.
You would only need these bits of info. for each REAL flight.:
Lat/Long, Alt, Direction, Speed, A/C Type, Flt#, for all a/c in a given radius (ie, 20nm) from the Simlator position.
The number of flt feeds could be limited for crowded areas, but most of the time 20-30 flights would be way more than ample, and not generate a ton of data to feed at a similar rate as current VATSIM feeds… (??) (I’m guessing.)
It seems to be feasible (this day and age), but sadly not in my bag of tricks.
