These flight tracks, although taken from actual radar data, are not in real time. There is a delay of ten minutes, as indicated in the lower left corner of the map window.
This web page gives instructions on launching the flight track display and all of the features of the display:
- Launching the Display
- Navigating the Map
- Near-Live Flight Tracks
- Flight Information Window
- Playback Control
- Display Tracks
- Address Lookup
- Contours
- Resize the Display
- Map Type
- Map Background & Contrast
- Help/Status
To start the display, click on the "Start Live Display" button on the main webpage, which looks like:
Once you click on the Live Display button, the map display will appear on your screen in a separate window. Depending upon the speed of your Internet connection, this can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute. When the map appears, the green button on the main web page will turn red:
This means the display is up and operating. If you click on the red button, the map display will disappear and the image will turn green again. (You can also exit the map display from the map window itself, like any other standard window.)
The Map Display contains a base map of Louisville:
Initially, the map is centered around the airport, but you can pan and zoom to see different areas of the map:
To navigate, double-click anywhere on the map to re-center. Then, use the "Zoom" pull-down choice (on the bottom left corner of the window) to zoom in and out. You can also use the scrollbars to slide left/right and up/down, but you'll find that double-clicking and then re-zooming is the faster way to navigate the map.
Another way to re-center and zoom is to click the Right Mouse Button over the map. This will give you a pop-up menu which includes:
- Re-center the map at the current mouse location
- Zoom in/out
- Re-center the map AND Zoom in/out
You'll note that the map window, and all windows that appear as part of this display, show the words "Warning: Applet Window" at the bottom. This is a standard security precaution built into most browsers (like Internet Explorer and Netscape) to warn you that this is an Internet window, not a normal program on your PC. You can ignore this warning.
Within a few moments after the map display appears, you should begin to see flights move around the map. These flights depict the flight traffic in near-real time, delayed by 10 minutes. If you look at the date and time depicted in the bottom left corner of the window, you will notice that it remains 10 minutes prior to the current time. The time is always represented in the Eastern (Kentucky) time zone, regardless of where your computer resides.
The data is processed from a radar feed, which gives a fairly accurate account of aircraft position and altitude. However, radar data can contain anomalies such as spikes and jags and reflections, which have been corrected as much as possible before being displayed on your screen. Nevertheless, if you see occasional odd jags in the flight tracks, these are likely radar anomalies and NOT true depictions of the flight track. These anomalies are not common, and will mostly likely occur when the flights are nearer to the ground, where radar data can more easily reflect off of nearby buildings.
Each flight is colored based on the type of operation:
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GREEN Aircraft are those that have been detected as departing from an airport (i.e., their altitude is rising instead of falling). |
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RED Aircraft are those that have been detected as arriving at an airport (i.e., their altitude is falling instead of rising). |
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WHITE Aircraft are "overflights", i.e., aircraft that have been detected as flying over the area, not landing or departing. They usually fly at a significantly higher altitude than the green and red flights. |
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BLACK Aircraft are those identified as "General Aviation" aircraft. These are identified based on a standard general aviation "transponder" code. They are usually smaller aircraft, not associated with any airline. No flight information (airline, aircraft, etc.) is known for general aviation flights. |
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ORANGE Aircraft are those that cannot be identified as being an arrival, departure, overflight, general aviation, or helicopter. Often these are general aviation aircraft, and in some cases the altitude is not reported and thus its flight type cannot be determined. |
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Helicopters on the display are those that have been detected as being helicopters. There is no particular information from the radar that identifies helicopter vs. non-helicopter, so the flight pattern is analyzed (based on its speed, altitude, turning pattern) and the flight is "detected" as being a helicopter based on these rules. For this reason, you may sometimes see orange aircraft "turn into" helicopters and vice versa, as the program tries its best to determine the type of flight. Since helicopters can indeed fly in a pattern similar to a small general aviation aircraft, some black/green/red/orange aircraft on the display may indeed be helicopters that have not been detected as such. |
You'll note that if you move the mouse over a moving aircraft, the altitude of the flight and its current speed will appear on the bottom of the screen:
The altitude is shown in terms of "msl", i.e., the number of feet above sea level. The speed is given in knots.
If you click on a moving aircraft (the aircraft image, not the "trail"), the aircraft will turn yellow and a "Flight Information" window will appear. This window gives information about this flight and depicts, in a bar chart, the altitude and speed:
The blue bar chart shows the altitude between 0 and 10,000 feet. (If the aircraft climbs above 10,000 feet, the bar will turn cyan-colored and show the altitude between 0 and 40,000 feet). The yellow bar chart shows the speed between 0 and 500 knots. Once you have clicked on the flight, the Flight Information window will continue to track this flight (i.e., the bar charts will update as the flight moves along the screen).
The top portion of the screen shows the logo for the airline, as well as:
- Operation: Departure or Arrival
- Time of Departure or Arrival
- Airport of Departure or Arrival
- Runway assigned
- Airline Code (e.g., DAL for Delta Airlines)
- Flight (e.g., DAL1790 for Delta Airlines 1790)
- Equipment type (e.g., B737 for Boeing 737)
- Class (Jet or Propeller)
- Destination Airport (e.g., LAX)
Via the Playback feature, described below, you can play back flights for any time period in the previous seven days. Flights that are played back for any day except the current day should have this flight information available, and thus it will appear in the Flight Information window.
Also note that helicopters and most smaller general aviation aircraft will not have this information available.
Only one Flight Information Window can be up at one time, so if you click on another flight the window will update with the new information.
From the window's menus, choose Playback Control:
You can also choose by clicking the Right Mouse Button over the map and choosing Playback Control:
This will bring up the Playback Control window:
You will notice that the date and time displayed in this window will match the date and time that is displayed on the bottom of the main map window: it depicts the date and time of the information currently being displayed (in the picture above, this is shown as date 4/19/02, 1:16:01 PM). Underneath the date is a white box showing the number of minutes the playback is delayed from real-time. i.e., the map is showing flights delayed by 10 minutes.
Using this display, you can stop the current display and begin playing back flights from any time in the previous 7 days. You can do this in one of two ways:
- By specifying a date and time to begin playback, or
- By specifying a number of minutes/seconds to delay from real-time
First, you must PAUSE the current display. To do this, click the PAUSE button. This will cause the other two buttons to become available.
To begin playing back at a specified date and time, type in the desired date (in the form of MM/DD/YY), the desired time (HH:MM:SS), and choose AM or PM. (If you use military time, e.g., 14:00:00, it will automatically change it to clock time, e.g., 2:00:00 PM.)
Every time you wish to change the playback, you must first click PAUSE to pause the current display. Every time a new playback begins, the current flights on the map are erased. In addition, you can erase the flights directly by clicking on the CLEAR FLIGHTS button on this display. This is useful if you wish to pause all flights and then clear all flights to view the map only (or to view sets of flight tracks, a feature which is described below).
The Address Lookup feature allows you to type in any address and see the location displayed on the map. The display will also show the distance between any address and any flight. To begin, choose Address Lookup from the Address Menu:
You can also choose by clicking the Right Mouse Button over the map and choosing Address Lookup:
This will launch the Address Lookup Window, which looks like;
In the top portion of the screen, you can type in any address. The standard format is:
Street Address, City, State
The State is optional, as it will assume Kentucky.
Every address that is typed in is added to a pull-down list, shown directly below the place where the address is typed in. This is a "shortcut" so you don't have to repeatedly re-type the same address over and over. Once an address is typed once, you can simply pick it from the list to see that address again.
Note that the pull-down list already has two entries:
320 W Jefferson, Louisville
W. Jefferson St., Louisville
This is simply to provide an example of a valid address. You can pick this address from the pull-down list to see this address.
The Address Lookup feature is also aware of many landmarks and their acronyms.
Note that once the address is typed in and the "Look up Address" button is clicked (or simply the Enter Key pressed), a list of matching addresses will appear below. In the example above, when SDF was typed, the list showed one entry:
SDF (Louisville International Airport), Kentucky
If there were multiple matches for the address typed, they would appear in the list and you can choose from among them. Note that once the address is entered, a green "house" appears on the map at the address location.
Because (in the example) the "Re-center on Lookup" check-box was checked, the map automatically re-centered to the desired address, as shown in the picture above (the green house appeared at SDF, and the map re-centered there). If "Re-center on Lookup" is NOT checked, the house will still appear on the map but the map will not automatically re-center to focus on the house. At any time you can re-center the map on the house by clicking the "Re-center Map" button.
The house will remain on the map, even after the Address Lookup window is closed, until you click on the "Clear" button.
If you click on the map while the Address Lookup Window is up, the Address Lookup will display the distance from the mouse-click to the address (in miles, or if less than in mile it will show the distance in feet). If you click on an aircraft, the aircraft window will show the distance from the aircraft, as well as the aircraft's altitude.
(Note that this distance is "ground distance", NOT a three-dimensional slant-range distance.)
Also, when you click on a flight while an address is present on the map (e.g., while there is a "house" on the map), the Flight Information window will display a bar chart of the distance between the aircraft and the house (again, this is a two-dimensional ground distance).
The red bar chart on the bottom right shows the distance from the address in miles, on a scale from 0 to 5. If the aircraft is more than 5 miles from the house, then the bar will turn blue and show the distance on a scale from 0 to 50 miles.
Note that the "yellow" aircraft is the one selected by the mouse.
Via the Map Type Menu choice:
or alternately by clicking the Right Mouse Button over the map:
The base map can be altered to be shown in black and white instead of color, and can be brightened or dimmed:
These features are also available by clicking the Right Mouse Button on the map:
Changing the color and contrast can sometimes make other object (planes, houses, tracks) easier to see. Note, though, that the display takes slightly longer to refresh when in black/white or dim/bright mode, thus making the display slower.
The Help Menu provides a link to this Instruction Webpage:
It also provide a Status Window:
The Status Window gives information about the program's ability to collect flight track data for display on your computer, and indicates if there are any firewall or other Internet issues. This Status Window will pop-up automatically if there is a problem in getting flight data to display.
The Trouble Shoot choice from the Help Menu:
brings up a webpage with tips on how to resolve typical browser problems that may prevent the program from running properly.