I find online airport departure boards quite interesting. Not that FA doesn’t show much the same information, but the online boards are typically more glitzy, flashing their “On Time”, “Boarding”, “Delayed”, and “Cancelled” indicators, as well as Gate numbers. They can be a handy supplement to FlightAware’s Airport Activity page when an airport is socked in by bad weather.
Yeah they’re definitely distinctive although less efficient. The number one thing that makes them appear so “classic” is that they use city names rather than airport names. That only works for passenger terminals, not for anything that serves all the airports like FlightAware.
It’d be cool for us to be able to include gate & gate status info.
Daniel, I wasn’t in any way trying to infer that FA is deficient. Actually, the two data views can be complementary.
Airport staffs are notorious for being undercommunicative. If you’re at the gate and you see that your flight is delayed, checking the Flight # via FA will show you about where the inbound flight of the same number is. You’d see that it’s 200 miles and 45 minutes out. That’s more than any airline will tell you.
A flight track map can show you that a flight is diverted long before the airport staff will acknowledge it.
On the other hand, the airport board will show a flight cancellation that FA shows only as ‘delayed’ or ‘scheduled’ because the aircraft’s flight plan is still not cancelled.
This can be like “two heads are better than one”.
One suggestion, Daniel, might be for FA to display a link to the airports’ Flight Status web pages on the Airport Activity page, just as FA shows a link to the airlines’ web pages on the Flight Tracking page.
One suggestion, Daniel, might be for FA to display a link to the airports’ Flight Status web pages on the Airport Activity page, just as FA shows a link to the airlines’ web pages on the Flight Tracking page.
Before FA (and similar sites ) I built my own .htm page linking to all the FIDS I could find and was interested in. Worked for about a week after which there were so many dead links I had to check/update it daily. I don’t know if the situation has improved at all, but I can’t imagine the maintenance horror of keeping hundreds (thousands ?) of them current
As far as linking, the key is you need to figure out how the links changes and have the software automatically generate a link using the same system that their software does.
) I built my own .htm page linking to all the FIDS I could find and was interested in. Worked for about a week after which there were so many dead links I had to check/update it daily. I don’t know if the situation has improved at all, but I can’t imagine the maintenance horror of keeping hundreds (thousands ?) of them current 