map "rewind"

Often while outdoors I will glimpse an airliner or jet-trail overhead, and wonder where it came from and where it is going. Could be anywhere.

With a “map-rewind” or map-history feature, I could select the nearest airport-map for that given location, enter the time of the observation and look for a vector that matches the general type, direction and estimated altitude.

That kind of capability might require a lot more system memory, however.

We keep tracklogs online until the next flight or a few days later (whichever comes first), so this is possible but it would probably only be useful for the previous ~20 hours (beyond that you’d have too many missing flights from airliners that flew again). We may be able to add this to an upcoming product.

I actually did something like this the other day… I saw a jet with 4 trails overhead, so about 5 minutes later I hopped on FA, looked up a nearby airport, and spotted a UPS B742 in the right position/direction.