Watching the travel unroll
Are you among the curious who see a contrail and wonder where the silver bullet might be headed? When a plane passes overhead, perhaps on approach to the local airport, do you try to read the markings, just in case? Welcome to the club.
I’m not a frequent flyer, but I do maintain a need to know when something other than a bird or an errant snowball passes overhead. This evening, given that a family member has “flown the coop” so to speak, I decided to put technology to work in keeping an eye on the rascal. There’s a surprising amount of material for the vicarious.
First up; radio. The VHF transceiver I purchased a couple of seasons back also scans the range of frequencies used in air-to-ground, so I did a quick search for the magic numbers, learned how to set up a multi-channel scan and then listened to the chatter. Not terribly interesting if you don’t have a clue about why people read numbers to one another. I did manage to snag the flight of interest, follow it through ground, to IFR, through the handoff to Montreal and a vector towards JFK. Beginner’s luck.
Next up, the virtual GPS for planespotters. My personal favourite is http://flightaware.com which provides hours of entertainment for the concerned parent. Right now, there’s a flight that is just to the east of Long Island with a personal descendent in the cheap seating. Hope he appreciates his 3 hours and 45 minutes at an average 36,000 feet with an effective airspeed of 454 knots. If I really want to turn up the interest, sometime in the future, I can provide a map showing the actual ground track, minute by minute!
OK, I’ll resist that urge, but I still think that this is much more exciting than a simple “He took a plane down south”.
