I was watching this flight the other night and have seen this happen once or twice before too, which always gives me a scare. As I was watching it, the flight route got near the airport and stayed there, but the progress bar was still showing several minutes left (dont remember, maybe 10?), and status said “En Route (No recent position)”. The progress bar finally got down to 0 minutes left and status still said “En Route (No recent position)”.
What does “result unknown” mean? (Back To Top)
It means that the estimated arrival time of the flight has passed without FlightAware marking the flight as “arrived.” There are the most likely reasons why this happened:
* The aircraft left the coverage area of the FAA and FlightAware is no longer receiving updates
* The FAA did not send an arrival message for a flight, which is rare.
* FlightAware did not receive or lost the arrival message, although this is even more rare.
It would also and most usualy occur when an aircraft is flying IFR and landing at an uncontrolled field. This is because when the aircraft cancels IFR (usualy within visual range of airport) ATC will drop the flight plan and have the pilot squawk VFR. The reason the track does not continue as a vfr flight is because the aircraft is now squawking 1200 and no information is associated with that aircraft.
For the first flight (in my OP), the destination is controlled, so IFR wouldn’t be cancelled. Just as I posted about here.
As far as the 3 senarios in the FAQ, #1 isn’t true, so it must be #2 or #3, though it says those are rare. And considering it’s controlled, could #2 even be possible? So #3 perhaps.
For flight #2 (in my reply), I don’t know anything about it, though I’d be surprised if they cancelled the IFR so far out.
The 2nd flight was only 320 miles long so that puts the pilot within at least 50 miles of airport so I wouldn’t be surprised if the pilot cancelled IFR, remember when going into an uncontrolled airport the pilot wants to switch to the UNICOM freq as soon as possible to monitor what’s going on at the airport. Yes, I know they can monitor the freq and still talk to approach, however if ATC is talking to a lot of other aircraft it makes it that much harder for the pilot to concentrate on UNICOM. So IMO I believe that they cancelled IFR and continued on their own. But I wasn’t their and can’t tell you for sure.
If the FA map is accurate, it was actually about 80 miles out. It’s possible, though I’ve never seen anyone cancel that far out. No real reason to. Plus they want ATC traffic avoidance as long as they can. ATC can monitor for them both the traffic in the area they’re still in and at the destination (and will advise on the traffic at the dest. when/if they cancel IFR in the air), and at that far out there’s no reason to even worry about the intentions of the traffic at the dest. yet, since it’ll be completely different when they get closer.
Though it’s possible.
But it seems dbaker is saying that wouldn’t have caused the ‘result unknown’ anyway.
I don’t think the date result is right. It shows tomorrow and status arrived. Also, they have the Next and previous link result is in a wrong location.
FYI - I checked a recent flight of mine and found the status to be “RESULT UNKNOWN”. The next tracking entry covered the rest of the flight. The first tracking stopped when I was told to change squak codes.
