I’ve seen a movie from Flightlevel350.com. I liked the movie very much so I decided to find it on FlightAware. There was such a flight but it was another route and a/c so I decided to choose one of the airlines that are on the list together with United Airlines. I chose China United Airlines and a list appeared. I clicked the first position and there was a very strange flight shown. flightaware.com/live/flight/ASH5001 I thought it might have been some error so I refreshed it a few times. Each time it was the same.
Why the airplane flew in such a strange way? Might it have been caused by turbulences/storms or so that were on their way to destination?
The normal route looks like this flightaware.com/live/flight/ASH5073
Today your ‘normal’ route looks just as irregular as your ‘strange’ route.
I think there are two factors that make the routings look odd. One is that they are undoubtedly dodging turbulent weather. In so short a flight distance, they can’t get to 30,000 feet to fly over the weather. The second factor is that the flight route is so short. If this were a portion of a KJFK/KLAX flight, the weather deviations would be less visible over a 3,000 mile route scale. Further, over the larger distance, there would be more time and space to smooth out any route deviation.
Looks like vectors for traffic and sequencing.
I doubt such small variations from the direct route are to avoid weather.
I’ll go with mduell on that. It’s aways just a guess, but I used to fly in that area a lot. KCLT gets very busy in pushes and do a lot of vecotring. You can see where they turned in really big angles and then re-joined the Chesterfield Two arrival followed by a long vectored downwind. Looks like they landed on 23, which they used to never do because it crosses 18L/36R.