I was looking at the map for KOAK this morning and as usual, looked up some of the en-route traffic in the Bay Area airspace. I noticed one track in the area of Watsonville, and the info block showed what appears to be “N8AZ” or “N8A Z” (the spacing is odd). I looked it up and the result was “FlightAware couldn’t find N8AZ yet” (and the same for N8A). (Both reg’s are valid, and are for a Lancair 360 and a Cessna 185, respectively, both registered in the Eastern U.S.)
Then I noticed that the track never moved, even when the map updated. Was this a bug or something stranger? This was around 1045 PST today.
I have seen a number of cases where there is a track and info block on the map, but FlightAware can’t find it. Sometimes it’s an airline flight, but more often it’s a tail number.
That odd spacing appears to just be a rendering issue with the font used on the maps server; notice the A is also rather close to the 8 and the spacing for the Southwest flight info box is also a little odd.
N8AZ (as well as N180DK, N62226, and N1819M on your screenshot) are flights receiving VFR flight following. Note that the info box is missing the aircraft type, since we never received the aircraft type in a flight plan. Also, since we haven’t received a flight plan, those flights don’t have a flight page.
If, however, an aircraft had flown IFR a few days earlier, wouldn’t you have today’s ‘flight following’ track graphically appended to the recent IFR track? Is it possible even that today’s ‘flight following’ might have its own graphic track without the earlier IFR track, since the aircraft has a historical Flight Activity page?
Correct; N62226 and N1819M have both had IFR flights in the past, so they have flight pages and the most recent VFR flight is plotted on their flight page.
