I conducted a search for map history and drew nothing, so let me apologize if I missed this before: Would it be rediculously expensive and/or difficult to enable users to not only look at a particular local map (KCLE, for example) of the present air traffic, but also to turn back the clock and see what was there recently? In other words, if I’m in the grocery store parking lot, and I see what looks like a 747 (or whatever), and I’m curious as to what flight it is, it would be nice to be able to back up the map once I get home to the time that I was observing the aircraft. Even if this feature only went back a couple hours, it would be really nice.
I got to thinking about this after seemingly every news outlet used passur.com’s flight history maps to show the flight path of the infamous Cirrus that slammed into the Manhattan apartment building. Don’t get me wrong, FA is a much better site than passur (not even counting the fact that passur is very limited on the areas that its radar maps cover). It would be cool if we could look back in time to i.d. what we saw earlier. If this isn’t possible or practical, just say so. Just a thought!!