Track Your Flight

Excellent new feature on Planes now.

There used to be a feature on the Inflight Entertainment where you could watch your progress across the ocean on the little screen embedded into the back of the seat in front. Even though progress across the Atlantic was slow, watching the little plane increment its way across the little map was usually better than the Inflight movie.

I haven’t been on a plane with Inflight Entertainment systems like this for a long time, and I don’t suppose they are necessary anymore, now that everyone carries their own devices. That must be a lot of unnecessary weight they’ve been able to remove.

The problem with carrying your own device though means that flight mode must be active, and that means no Inflight tracking. Until now.

On my last flight they were trialling a new customer app that allows you to order food and drink, duty free etc from your seat. I’m not really interested in that sort of thing, but what did grab my attention was the flight progress monitor.

With Flight Mode on, you can now connect your phone to the local loop network on the plane, and then open up a map that shows your progress. It shows you where you are, your direction, altitude and even speed.

On this particular flight we topped out at 650 miles per hour, at 36000 feet. This is somewhat faster than regular flights but we were very late.

It’s interesting to compare this with the Flight Radar app. Flight Radar is an app that tracks your flight in real time and logs it for replaying later.

This is really cool. I use Flight Radar all the time. Usually when something loud flies overhead and I want to know it was. Indeed, the highlight of a holiday in Puerto del Carmen was sitting on the balcony, looking out to sea, and watching the planes circle and land at the very nearby Aracife airport, looking up where they came from on the app. Not that I make a habit of such things.

On the way back from a school trip earlier this year, my son was snapping shots from the plane at the same time as I was taking screenshots of the flight app. When he got home we compared notes. These are two photos taken within a minute of each other, and I could identify the plane in the photo on the right. Modern technology might be evil, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be cool.