Does anyone know if there is a service where you can define a region on a map and a date and time, and essentially ask “What aircraft were there at that time”? Is this a function available in FlightAware perhaps? I’ve looked around and can’t find anything like this anywhere.
A friend of mine saw an unusual aircraft go over his house and wondered what it was, but without catching it on PiAware at the time I had no way to find out. That made me wonder if this is a thing. I appreciate I could install some local logging scripts or feed a VRS instance and have that log, but I thought I’d ask anyway in case this is already out there.
And I don’t think our robotic friend is correct. I can’t find anything to show that FlightAware Global supports this capability, and in any case an Enterprise account doesn’t appear to give access to Global.
To answer my own question from last year, this service is available in FlightRadar24 (Playback icon at the bottom) and Plane Finder (Playback icon in the upper-right).
The history is available for free for 7 days and 14 days respectively. If feeding them, history is available for 3 years from each.
Comparing the two, I have found FlightRadar24’s data to be more accurate and complete overall.
