How to Track Airline Flights in the Air

Airplane in flight tracked by FlightAware.

You are picking up a friend or relative and need check if their flight is landing on time, or your loved one is traveling overseas and you wish to track their flight in-route to make sure the plane lands at its scheduled destination. You can visit the airline's website to see a flight arrival time, or tell the airline to text or phone you if a flight is delayed, but you are limited to trusting the airlines optimistic appraisal of when a flight will be at the gate. By using an in-flight tracker that shows you graphically on a map where a plane is in the sky, you can more accurately determine if a flight will arrive on time, if it is circling the airport waiting for a gate, or if the flight is off-course. You can use this information to determine when a flight will arrive usually before the airline's website updates the arrival time.

Things You'll Need

• Computer with Internet access

Instructions

1. Go to FlightAware.com. FlightAware is a free website that receives constant data from the FAA's radar system, and plots this data on a map. FlightAware tracks, each day, where more than 50,000 flights in the world are located in the sky. The flight paths are displayed with only a few minutes lag time.

   FlightAware is frequently consulted by the media in famous cases of pilot error and air crashes due to the their reputation as being the most accurate in-flight tracking system available to civilians.

2. Enter the Flight Number you wish to track in the left-side of the FlightAware home page. If you don't know the Flight Number, you can also search for flights by airline name or airport.

3. Click the "Track Flight" button.

4. Look at the FlightAware map in the center of the screen to see the airplane's flight path.

   On the right side of the screen, you can also learn the current flight duration, and its status, arrived, on-time or delayed. If delayed, you'll see a updated flight arrival time.

Tips & Warnings

• For delayed flights, look at the FlightAware map. You can tell whether the plane is in the airport's vicinity by watching it circle the airport, or if the flight will be delayed further because it is hundreds of miles away from its destination.

• For iphone users, a FlightAware iphone app is available for a small fee.

References

• FlightAware
• NYTimes: App of the Week - See if Planes are Late to the Gate; Roy Furchgott; 2009

Resources

• The New York Times: Booked on AA Flight 1659? Better Take a Book; Cnuck Bailey; 2007
• NYTimes: Experts Puzzle Over How Flight Overshot Airport; Micheline Maynard; 2009