Recently the portions of my IFR tracks in Portland and Seattle TRACON airspace are missing - only portions in Center airspace show up. This can be seen on any of the recent flights for N8984N or NGF84N. What’s up?
Unfortunately this is not an uncommon issue. Sometimes aircraft talking to controllers other than center won’t have their position make it all the way up to the national level system at the FAA that we pull our tracking data from.
Sometimes the center controller will drop the track after the aircraft is handed off and enters the TRACONs airspace. This seems to be most prevelent within busy airspace and cleans up the controllers display.
With some exceptions arrivals are dropped from the NAS system completely after the center drops the track. Few TRACONs report data back to the NAS once the track is dropped.