Strange Flight this morning...

I live in Central Canada and was shocked this morning when I saw the information for this plane. It was a Korean Airline flight - Tokyo to Seoul. That’s a little far from a typical flight plan. :slight_smile: Stats showed it was 195 knots and 4200 feet which is very odd. Never for a visual on this one, so I’m wondering if there was some weird glitch - I actually had my husband look it up on his computer, to make sure it wasn’t a glitch with the app. He saw it too. Anyone else ever have this happen?

For… what plane? What flight?

As I said, it was a Korean air flight from Tokyo to Seoul. That wouldn’t fly over Canada.

How did you decide it was a Korean air flight from Tokyo to Seoul? Did you follow a callsign-based link or something similar? What was the callsign?

(The point I was trying to make was that you have not given enough information to find whatever it was you saw; without that, there’s not much to say other than “cool story bro”)

If I had to guess, it’s probably just a case of callsign collision - callsigns are not globally unique.

When you click on the plane in the app, it indicates the airline, location, speed, altitude, type of plane, destination etc. It’s just the first time in 8 months of transmitting with our own ads-b and tracking, that a plane has shown up that in all likelihood isn’t even remotely close (read: not even in the same country) to where it’s indicated. My experience with FlightAware has been flawless, so this was quite odd.

What do you mean by “the app”?

Screenshots would be very helpful (next time, I suppose) as it’s not clear from your description what you’re actually looking at here.

Sorry, my bad. I thought that FlightAware had an app for my iphone, but I see now that I had just bookmarked the tracking page.

Here is a screenshot of what I saw:

facebook.com/photo.php?fbid … =3&theater

Almost certainly callsign collision then - something local to you is sending KAL2 as the callsign and FA is matching that up to the only thing it knows of by that name.
Route and airline info is not transmitted by the aircraft, it needs to be looked up externally.

(edit: see pclifton’s post below, actually)

flightaware.com/live/flight/KAL … /RJAA/RKSI appears to be the culprit. Partway through the flight, an ADS-B station near Osan sent a batch of very wrong positions, which bunged up tracking for the remainder of the flight.

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Interesting. Thanks!