Wormhole from Santa Monica to Oaktown, Indiana?

I departed Santa Monica (KSMO) in N668DB this afternoon for an IFR climb to VFR on top. FlightAware shows my flight’s destination as Oaktown, Indiana (KOTN), and says I got there in one minute flat! Another flight departing about half an hour later shows the same destination and time.

Bug, or feature? If there’s any way of getting my flight to go that quickly, I’d appreciate hearing about it. :wink:

Cheers!
Rick

Hey Rick,

Is that AvGas or Jet A you are burning?

I have seen the same funky voodoo on some of my flights, can’t wait to hear why?

Hi, Rick.

I checked our data logs for N668DB and I see at 00:00Z that we received a flight plan for an immediate departure of N668DB from SMO D-> OTN (5kft, 123kts, no ETE) and then a few minues later, we received the departure for SMO-OTN followed by three position updates (1000ft, 1900ft, 2600ft), and then finally an arrival notice three minutes later.

Perhaps they meant to type in OTP, which could be a special code that they use to indicate a climb to VFR On ToP? Although I understand that it’s all bogus, it looks like FlightAware “correctly” handled the situation as presented by ZLA.

Out of curiosity, why didn’t you file IFR to your destination? Would you have been unable to receive your preferred routing and you were going to break out the marine layer in the LA basin and be VFR at your destination? I happened to notice in “My FlightAware” earlier that SMO was reporting LIFR all morning.

I suspect you are right about OTN being a code for OTP. Lots of flights out of SMO seem to “go there.”

It was just a local practice flight. The field had been VFR and went IFR just as we were going to depart, so we requested a VFR OTP clearance from the tower. We actually did give them VNY as a destination. After flying around for :45 or so we had to request an IFR clearance back to the field. That one didn’t seem to make it into FlightAware, though.

FlightAware is a very useful internet site. Thanks for your work on it!

Best regards,
Rick