QTR 51 is a flight that operates from Doha (OTBD) to Dulles (KIAD).
I do understand that “most of this flight occurs outside FlightAware’s service area” and the “information on the page may be unreliable”.
But it does seem remarkable how regularly this time-traveler manages to arrive at Dulles on the day before it departed.
So is this truly a case of faulty/incomplete input data to FlightAware or might there be some other issue related to the processing/display of the input data by FA? The flight duration is about 15 hours…perhaps that affects some computation?
For the record, the QTR51 schedule is an 11:30 local (= 08:30 GMT) departure from OTBD and a 19:00 EDT arrival into KIAD on the same day.
Take a look at the “Questions/Answers” link. You can find it in the upper right hand corner of any FlightAware Page. You’ll find your answer there.
I do understand that FlightAware tracks flights with a foreign origin after they enter US airspace., but that does not explain clearly (to me) why the arrival time of this flight is reported to be the the day before the departure even in the case where the origin time is not italicized. So maybe I am just not seeing the specific question/answer pair in the FAQ that you want me to see. Perhaps someone else can point me to the right Q/A pair.
I saw what I thought was a consistent discrepancy or anomaly in tracking data. So I posted it in the discussion forum as the FAQ said I ought to do.
Take a look at the time zones…
I do not think what I am referring to is a time-zone issue… you can see it even if you set all displayed times to GMT.
For example, there is the QTR51 flight that departed OTBD on Aug 21th 09:03 GMT and (allegedly) arrived at KIAD on Aug 20th 22:07 GMT (the previous day).
However, I do see now, is that this oddity is not common if the origin time is not in italics. So it could be an anomaly with a few data sets.
The issue is always present when the origin time is in italics. In all those cases, the aircraft “arrives” on the day before that of the proposed departure, but those proposed/estimated times are probably unreliable anyway.
Just accept as gospel " At least part of this flight occurs outside of FlightAware’s service area. Information on this page may be unreliable."
Why? Because FlightAware (and all other flight trackers) are not able to get reliable data from flight agencies outside of the USA.
Until the international flight arrives " today ", FA can only revert back to the last time the plane was tracked, many times that was the last scheduled flight. Yesterday - week ago - 21 Days on so on.
You can track international flights on local maps, but until FAA / NAVCanada sends the arrivial message, the flight will not show up as current on FA. So you will not be able to access the current track log or see the curent flight path until after the fact.
link to discussed flight
flightaware.com/live/flight/QTR51
