I have an idea I would like to share. I, like many other plane spotters, frequently use Flight Aware to track aircraft I want to see. For big airports though, like ORD, that gets thousands of flights a day, it is somewhat hard to keep having to look through many pages to see what is inbound. The current flight alerts are nice, but I would like to see that portion of the site expanded. It would be cool to be able to set more parameters, for one thing. As of right now, we can only set up specific flights or aircraft, but sometimes I want more. For example, at ORD, occasionally we get Polar Air Cargo flights, which I would like to see, but the flight number changes every time, so there is no way to set up an alert. Another example, is how occasionally, Air Bridge Cargo subs in a 747-8 on one of their many flights, but again, the flight number changes, and sometimes, it operates at night, when we cant see it. That would be nice to set up an alert for say any ABW flight operating 748 equipment to ORD scheduled to arrive between X and X hours. The next issue, is how with the free account, only 5 aircraft alerts can be made before an account upgrade is needed. The current paid account upgrades are too expensive for just plane spotters though, so perhaps a new category could be made. For example, you could upgrade to an account for say $25 a year that would only entitle you to have more flight alerts. If you gave a good amount of alerts, say 30-40 at a time, I think you would get a lot of us to pay.
I think people would pay $25 a year to have old layout on their mobile devices.
I’ve noticed that lately I’ve been using more flytecomm to see all flights while spotting. At least they show up on one page.
One other helpful feature would be a way to easily export non historic data to excel or a similar program. For example, when I head to the Airport ( usually in my case, O’Hare) for a day of plane spotting, I will prepare a spreadsheet with Flight, Origin, A/C type, ETA and a plank. this way I can make notes such a registration number next to the flight info so that I ca later further identify and tag my photos.
It can be done now, but it is a cumbersome process.
I would pay something for this.
-Charles III