My Cross-Country Adventure

Tracking

There are a number of great flight tracking tools now on the internet. One of my favorite is FlightAware. It has a nice, straightforward interface with some extra bells and whistles if you go looking for them.

To track my flight in real-time, use this link: http://flightaware.com/live/flight/N28819.

Some orientation for non-pilots:

Commercial flights are tracked by flight number. Each day, a different aircraft flies the route, but the flight number is the same. For private flights, tracking is by tail number, or the aircraft's registration number. Mine is N28819, so with this tool, you can spy on all my personal flights.
In general, there are two ways flights are conducted. Under VFR or visual flight rules, you generally go where you want, oftentimes without need to talk to air traffic control. These flights are not tracked, because even if I show up as a blip on radar, the controller has no idea what my tail number is. Under IFR or instrument flight rules, you must file a flight plan, and in simple terms, you then go where air traffic control tells you to go. It's these IFR flights that show up on FlightAware. So in reality, you'll only be able to spy on some of my flights.

For the trip home from New York, my plan is to file an IFR flight plan even if conditions allow VFR. Among the reasons for doing this is safety - if I were to disappear somehow, it will be noticed much sooner when flying IFR. Another reason is for proficiency. There's a lot of pilot-speak and pilot-action that happens under IFR, and I don't think I practice often enough. It's not the same doing it on a bright sunny day as when stuck in a cloud being blown around the sky, but it's practice all the same.

Aviation Charts

http://www.skyvector.com is a nice site that provides VFR navigation charts for the country. I haven't taken the time to figure out if I can overlay my flight path on it or other sites like it yet (and probably won't ever get to it). But, if you are familiar with them, you can try to match these charts up to the routing info that FlightAware has...

Back to Main