Rename “Live Tracking” and “Live Flight Tracker” to “Latest Tracking” and “Latest Flight Tracking” respectively, owing to the data latency issue.
Add a data acquisition timestamp to the map caption. i.e. “As of 7/29/06 15:22cdt. Flights in blue are to/from KDFW. Flights in green are in the vicinity.”
He said “…to the map caption.”
I agree with #2. Unless you actually see the screen refresh, you dont know how current the map is or when the last refresh was.
The FAQ says 5-6 minutes. My observations are more like 9-12 minutes. A cruising jetliner moves at about 8 miles/minute, so misleading the location by use of the term “Live” means the aircraft may be offset by 72-96 nautical miles instead of the FAQ derived value of 40-48 miles. It seems more accurate to say “Latest” except for those of you who are happy to live farther in the past while believing it is “Now”.
It would be easy to add timestamp annotations to the maps, since the track coordinates are already timestamped. One might just use the average timestamp of the set of the latest coordinates – discarding timestamps outside of a tolerance threshold.
I have also noticed that overlapping data sources, say from a terminal radar mixed with Center radar, are occasionally out of sequence and/or slightly out of alignment. This causes a jitter in the track. Not a big deal, but another feature enhancement might be better sorting/filtering algorithms.
Figure to bump this up for the number 2 suggestion.
This feature may be helpful when someone captures an image file and it may be easier to research a question when that question is asked a day or two later and the user doesn’t know the time within a reasonable period of time when the image was captured.