Something is seriously wrong when flights between international airports and US airports are shown “Taxiing” for an hour from the International Departure Airport when in point of fact the plane has been airborn for 38 minutes of that hour. The status “Taxiing” means that Flight Aware had input from somewhere to know the aircraft is no longer at the gate so how can the info be so out of whack as to the plane taking off?
Some airlines reliably provide gate departure but not runway departure. When we notice gaps we work with them to improve the reliability or assume departures after they leave the gate if they can’t provide us with wheels up.
Please post examples when you come across them.
Here’s an example. Emirates Air Flt 221 left Dubai at 2:42 on 4/8/12. About 20 mins after pushback the flight was reported in the air by Emirates Air on their web site. It flew 8000 plus miles. When I went to bed you guys knew the flight had pushed back from the gate at 2:42 and had it taxiing at the airport for over 3 and a half hours. So obviously there was some reporting. When I woke up in the morning the flight was two hours from DFW. You guys showed it as having two hours left, that it had flown almost 5000 miles and was going to do a little over 3000 statute miles in the next two hours which we both know wasn’t going to happen. I can understand planes over the Middle East not having a good reporting system but from Greenland on in to the USA there are plenty of checkpoints and it makes no sense to me that a plane that had been in the area of the Continental US for almost 4 hours could not be seen by you folks. What am I missing?
I don’t think the Emirates site differentiates between left gate and left runway; as soon as it pushes the flight becomes “In flight”. When they tell us it leaves the gate we mark it as taxiing and we wait for some other confirmation it’s in the air.
Emirates is a new airline for us and it looks like some flights are having issues. They’re not sending a reliable wheels up indicator, and due to the delay of entering US airspace it’s not matching to the right day’s flight. I’ll forward this example to the development team.
Well I do know that I monitored both their web site and yours. They showed the plane pushed back, the 20 minutes or so of taxiing and then the wheels up. You guys did show the push back at 2:42 but thats it.
Thanks for the replies.