Flight radar - air space above Europe live | Hacker News Reader

Flight radar - air space above Europe live

flightradar24.com

57 pointsyread21 comments

Cool. I wonder what's happening with KLM 7021: http://i.imgur.com/ulwdC.png -- it seems to have taken off Amsterdam, then flew to the coast of Norway where it flew in circles.. then decreased the height while flying to Billund, Denmark, then finally returning to Amsterdam.

As a-priori pointed out in another reply:

My guess is that someone forgot to change the flight number on the transponder, so what you're looking at is the path of one plane over a couple flights.

How does that explain the circling?

I'm tempted to suggest that the aircraft was put into a holding pattern, likely due to foul weather at the destination, and eventually forced to reroute.

Indeed that is how holding pattern looks like.

Very low ceiling at Billund right now.

Could the circling be due to waiting for landing due to a lot of congestion at the airport? I'm not a pilot so I'm curious how that's normally handled.

Congestion is often handled via "stacking" aircraft in a pattern like you see in the image, separated for safety and timing of approach. There may well be other aircraft in the stack but not reported via that site or there may be just the one at that time. In either case, the apparent reroute suggests more than congestion.

(For the record: I am not a professional pilot but I have flown and have family who are commercial aviators going on some 40 years.)

http://www.radarvirtuel.com/ is a similar concept but they seem to have more ADS-B receivers in play, so there's better coverage of Europe (and also some of the rest of the world).

Can anyone explain what's going on with this flight? http://imgur.com/by0C0.jpg

My guess is that someone forgot to change the flight number on the transponder, so what you're looking at is the path of one plane over a couple flights.

ADS-B data isn't linked to the transponder code - each plane has a serial number assigned by the ICAO. So this is the simply one plane flying several different routes.

the flight number is what was left unchanged between several flights, thus they appear as one.

leaving transponder code unchanged after request by ATC is a serious violation.

This seems to be a not too uncommon occurrence based on what I've seen via the site. I find it a bit discomforting that this happens at all.

There are multi-leg flights that share the same flight number. I recall of a particular AA flight that has the same flight number from JFK-ORD and subsequently from ORD-MIA (or something like that).

yeah, it reappears all the time

This seems to be a little flakey. I tracked one flight due to end up at aberdeen, and decided to open the page on a different machine so I could watch it out of the corner of my eye. That flight was simply not there. Then, refreshing the screen, it disappeared as well.

That looks like only a small portion of the commercial airline traffic.

"Aircrafts equipped with an ADS-B transponder are visible on the map."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dependent_surveillanc...

Guess most planes don't have it yet.

All jets should have it by now, most turboprops and GAs don't.

Out of curiosity does anyone know if Flightcaster use this type of data in it's analytics ?

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