Not to take anything away from FlightAware, but I found a site that tracks traffic around the NY airports. The page updates about every 5 seconds, so it’s very much like watching them in real time like on a controller’s scope. You can do a replay based on earlier dates and times (check out the skies over new york at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon). You can center the map on TEB, LGA, JFK and EWR. You can zoom in or out to 5, 10, 20, 40, 80 miles. You can change the speed from normal up to 10X.
Needlenose, Not to discourage you from pointing out new things, but this is a pretty old thing that has come up before: Passur, which not only is a competitor to FA, but generally is considered a “toy” site. It provides almost no information about a flight. What is does provide is based on the same info as FA (FAA radar data), except that its delayed by an ADDITIONAL 5 or so minutes over FA’s, which makes it about 10 minutes delayed from real time.
The apparently faster update time is simply a matter of artificially moving the airplane icon more often. The FAA radar updates don’t really come that fast so they have to fake it. That might be what accounts for the additional delay.
The display does have a couple features that I hope FA will implement some day, like zoom (in the works). I’m not sure if the ability to pause and playback is a practical feature or just something fun to play with.
I agree that it is toylike in that it provides little data about individual aircraft. If you wanna call it a “competitor” to FA, then I guess you could call Colgan Air ( http://www.colganair.com/routemap.html ) a competitor with American Airlines. I’m sure nobody at FA is shaking in fear over this site.
What I find interesting about the site is the ability to watch the motion of the heavily congested traffic patterns of the neighboring airports. I’m sure FA is NOT going to lose 1 single member or visitor because of this site. If they do, then it won’t be much of a loss, right?
Sorry I wasn’t around when it was mentioned before…
The only things I like on that site is how you can click on the flights instead of typing them in, also the zoom on the maps. But it doesn’t give a lot of info on the flights.
Passur is a professional product that in most cases gets it data from it’s own radar receivers placed around an airport. Their systems calculate the position of aircraft by triangulation. It works off transponder data, and therefore displays almost all aircraft - not just those on an IFR flight plan. Their data is updated every few seconds in real-time. It is deliberately delayed for the public sites. It’s not flight plan data from the FAA at all, but direct from the aircraft. Hardly a toy - it’s costs tens of thousands of dollars. You are just seeing the public view of the data.
Perhaps I stand corrected. I really don’t know much about Passur. However, given a 10 minute delay, with limited flight info, limited locations, and other limitations I would say that Passur, or at least the “public” presentation of it, can’t hold a candle to FA.
But one would wonder: If they generate their own data from transponder receivers then they would not fall under the FAA restrictions on delayed presentation, so why would they deliberately delay presentation of the data by 10 minutes? I guess it would be to protect a paid subscription service.
Right, but it depends on what you want the application for. I think Passur was initially developed for noise studies, where it is important to get aircraft ID, and a precise position and altitude. Passur has real-time updates every 4-5 seconds - something like 10 times more often that FA and the other guys using FAA data.
Yes, I think it’s more of "in their best interest’ to delay it and be consistent with other tracking applications. But, of course, the paid subscriptions is another reason - it certainly is extremely expensive.
The FAA did really drop the ball on the new ADS-B hardware available now…and Passur will probably soon be obsolete when you can receive your own transponder data with hardware costing $1000!
Somewhat different data and different applications. Transponder data knows the aircraft data only - not route and flight plan info.
