I really find this site useful to track family members flying both private and commercial. However, lately (last few weeks, approximately) Flightaware will
register an IFR flightplan, and it shows up on the live flight tracker under our tail # (N5442T), but there is no actual speed or altitude data, nor does a track show up on the graphic.
Any thought?
Was the whole flight flown IFR? It seems as if a departure message was received, but that’s where the tracking ends.
I thought he filed IFR tonight, but I’ll have to find out later if he canceled in the air. Last flight I know he went “VFR on top” for a part of the trip, so that may explain that one.
BUt this is not a general glitch for other users, I guess.
I am the pilot of N5442T, the subject of this dropped tracking issue. Yes, this flight was conducted entirely in IFR except for the last 10 miles. If you go back and look at my last several flights between KGFL and KBUF they have consistently been dropped. I am flying between 6,000 and 9,000 feet with radar coverage. I think it’s a problem with FlightAware
Not so fast, Skippy… 
FlightAware gets their info from the FAA. It has been mentioned before that some IFR flights at lower altitudes won’t show up on the tracking.
EVERYONE…Don’t be so quick to blame FA for all problems with flight tracking. Remember, they get they rely on the FAA for data. No data from FAA, no ability to track. And as always, remember the biggest thing of all about FlightAware…IT’S FREE.
Thank you, and have a nice flight.
Agreed. I love FlightAware and greatly appreciate the free service. It’s just that on these flights I was defintetly on radar. Over Rochester and Syracuse they were calling traffic to me, and while over the Adirondacks, I asked for lower and the Albany Controller said, “lower in ten miles.” So they could defintely see me. The problem might have been the feed from the FAA, or it could have been on FlightAware’s pickup of that feed.
Thank you, Pika. I agree with you 100% - FlightAware can only display what it gets from the FAA. There’s an old acronym in computers called GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage
It looks like an issue with the local ATC computer systems not sending the radar positions up the chain. For the first 45 minutes of the flight (after the departure message), we didn’t receive any position reports for the flight. Then we started to receive them every 4 minutes, which is typical for VFR flights (with flight following), rather than the 1 minute intervals for IFR flights.
To reply to pika’s comment about low altitude flights, we usually see information about cross country IFR flights regardless of altitude. It’s the local flights that we often don’t receive any information about.
When you say local flights, do you mean local controllers, such as approach controllers in C, and TRSA airspaces as well as local flights?
I am consistently not getting picked up on my tracklogs anytime I fly into KEKY whether it be leaving or arriving. See flightaware.com/live/flight/N194 … O/tracklog
and flightaware.com/live/flight/N194 … Y/tracklog
Notice my altitude, where it seems like once I exit Atlanta center I get dropped or enter Atlanta center, I get picked up.
I don’t cancel IFR until I am within 5 miles or so, and by that time, I am at 2,400 feet. On the above mention flight, I picked up my clearance via Birmingham CD for departing KEKY.
Allen
The bottom line is that the flight has to make it up to the national level computer systems for us to see it. Here’s a reasonably accurate rule of thump to predict if we’ll see your flight:
If you talk to center, we’ll probably see your flight.
If you talk to only one departure/approach controller (e.g. flying practice approaches at the local charlie or delta), we probably won’t see your flight.
If you talk to multiple departure/approach controllers but not center, it’s a toss up; depends on many factors including but not limited to altitude, controller work load, facility equipment, etc.
Sometimes controllers only use a partial tail number, even for IFR flights; we’ve seen plenty of cases where the page for N3AB has a “weird” flight (different type, different region, etc) because N123AB made the flight and the controller only typed in the last three characters. It’s not common, but it does happen, especially with flights that are handled by just one or a few approach controllers.
Went back and searched to find the thread and I did realize that I was 1/2 right. Thanks for clarifying Mark. YOU DA MAN!!
Dallas area controllers must really be on the ball. I regularly see local KADS/KADS flights fully tracked, like this one:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N6059U/history/20070120/1817Z/KADS/KADS
The flight was NOT fully tracked.
The end of the flight wasn’t tracked all the way back to KADS.
Look at the flight log and you will see the track log ended at 2000 feet.
Allen
[quote=“lieberma”]
VERY interesting observation, Allen. It seems that the flight map on the “live flight tracking” page is significantly longer than the track log. I used Google Map to locate the lat/lon pairs.
The northernmost point on the track log is at 12:17 and corresponds to Addison airport (KADS). The track log goes southeast from there, so we know which direction the flight map was flown in.
The end of the track log, at 2000 feet as you point out, is located over the far south part of Dallas, around the top of the straight N/S leg of the flight. From there, the plane takes an 090 bearing, swings over to the north, flies north of KADS to around McKinney, and finally heads south coming into KADS at a heading of 160 or so. This segment just isn’t recorded in the flight track.
Another interesting point is the timing. The last data point of the track log is at 01:59, yet the arrival time is noted as 01:54. What’s up with that?
Here are my thoughts on that. The pilot dropped IFR at 1:59 and continued VFR with flight-following. The arrival message went out at 1:59. FA corrects for a 5 minute data delay and calls it a 1:54 arrival. The track log stops. The flight continues and is tracked on the “live flight tracking” map to its actual landing.
Interesting glitch, too. At one point as I was typing and referring back and forth to the map, the post-1:59 track disappeared from “live flight tracking”. I refreshed the map and got it back. At some point, I think FA reconciles the flight map with the track log and any “flight-following” map coverage is erased.
That’s sad. I’d like to see all the “flight-following” maps survive. I think they don’t and that may explain many of the complaints we see about dropped tracks. This is typically attributed to an FAA arrival message, but I suspect the flight track on the map is really there but does not survive FA’s reconciliation to the FAA track log.
Before FA gave us the capability to search for map/tracks of past flight, we always saw “flight-following” maps until the whole map disappeared because there was a later flight. Now we can look at into the past with flight history maps/tracks.
All “flight-following” gets erased in “history”. Can this be changed? After all, FA once really did have this data. It just wasn’t in a tracklog.
That’s an interesting theory, toby, but the messages from the FAA are timestamped by them. When we received the arrival message (around 1:59) it told us the arrival occurred at 1:54. The map only plots the positions up to the arrival message. I’ll look into the extra positions in the tracklog.
With regard to the position reports not assoicated with an IFR flight, we actually had a meeting about them last week. We’re still undecided if we want to present them as blobs (an entry in the activity history of “positions not associated with a flight”) or try to derive origin/destination information.
Your theory is interesting too, Mark. But I see what I see on the map.
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N6059U/history/20070120/1817Z/KADS/KADS
That stuff north of KADS isn’t on the tracklog. So where does it come from? It was flown after the arrival message.