I’m writing today with a couple major FlightAware announcements.
First, we’re proud to announce that based on number of flight tracking results served to web users, FlightAware is now the most popular flight tracking service on the Internet. Beyond our interesting results, attractive maps, and enticing links to further tracking queries the primary reason for this amazing growth (after just two months of public beta) is the amazing outgrowth of support and enthusiasm from our users and members. FlightAware’s growth has been almost exclusively the result of word of mouth and as a result we’ve been enjoying traffic growth at the rate of 20% a day. We marvel at the response that’s bringing tens of thousands of unique users every day with hundreds of new member registrations daily (roughly one new registered member every 5 minutes). It’s exciting to have such phenomenal growth, although in providing technology that’s superior to other comparable Internet applications with none of the cost it’s hard to imagine how FlightAware wouldn’t be number one.
Second, as many users have likely noticed, the “Beta” notice next to FlightAware’s name was removed this evening. Although there is still plenty of work to do, we feel that we’ve resolved all the outstanding issues that stood in the way of a non-beta launch. We’ve also scaled our infrastructure with additional hardware and networking investments so that we can to continue to support our growth rate. Those of you that have been following the “Announcements” area on the discussion board or contributing to the other forums have been aware of all our progress. Your feedback and enthusiasm have led directly to the rapid rate of improvement. Please rest assured that this doesn’t mean there will be any decrease in the level of development energy that FlightAware users have come to expect – In fact, with less focus on the core infrastructure our development team can shift focus towards new and innovative FlightAware applications. The road map for FlightAware’s future products and services is incredible and you can rest assured that we’ll continue to change how people think about flight tracking.
Of course, in addition to the incredible user support, the success of FlightAware’s web site is largely due to our entire development team, operations staff, and especially our lead product managers, Karl Lehenbauer and David McNett as well as quality assurance director, Mark Duell.
Everything you knew about flight tracking has been changed by FlightAware, the Internet’s most popular flight tracker. Thanks for your continued support.
Daniel Baker
FlightAware