What qualifies as a flight for the purposes of...

What qualifies as a “flight” to flightaware?

I’m currently watching one of my ADS-B equipped aircraft playing around in the practice area north of KPSC. I’ve watched it do this several times. When it lands, it doesn’t show up in FA’s history for the aircraft.

I assume there’s some sort of criteria it’s missing for it to be logged as a “flight”.

It’s never getting more than 15 miles from home. It’s almost certainly staying under 4000 feet through it’s entire trip, and it’s landing at the same airport (it’s a trainer, owned by a nearby flight training center).

I doubt they’re requesting flight following or anything, and they’re playing VFR most of the time.

There’s been about five flights since 23NOV and I haven’t seen any of them logged on the aircraft’s status page. EDIT: I do see the aircraft showing on my PiAware’s page, just not in FA’s flight history for the aircraft.

Simply put, what qualifies as a “flight” to FA?

We’d need an IFR flightplan in our US coverage area, or some flightplan-replacing information (like schedules/flight info we get from airlines), to have a flight.

For flights without a flightplan we can string together position-only flights, but we don’t show them by default since there’s a lot of noise. You can enable visibility to them in section 6 of account settings.

Thank you! That explains a lot.

They’re definitely not filing flight plans, and running around in a valley where there’s probably not enough position data to piece together a position-only flight.