So Geeks R Us strikes again! The following are two
amazing websites http://www.flightradar24.com/ and http://uk.flightaware.com/
oh it’s ok you can click them, you’ll either love them straight away, in which
case you may already know about them or know immediately that you are not going
to ever like them or anything like them and that you are not going to be bitten
by any geek bug!!
Today and ongoing I had every need and
justification to be a total geek. My son and his girlfriend are travelling by
plane for 12½ hours, non stop London Heathrow to Singapore with Singapore
Airlines. Not only that they are on the world’s largest commercial aircraft the
A380 and I can follow them every inch of the way. So I therefore become even
more of a geek than usual because I have someone on one of those little animated
planes.
Using live departure and arrival boards, the airline sites and simply just the flight number in to Google and these two sites you are your own flight manager, it really is amazing. Try it!
Start with a major airport in the UK or Europe and just click around on a few flight numbers and allow yourself to ask some questions, what aircraft, where is it going and press some buttons!! You've lost nothing except a couple of minutes and hey you might even appreciate exactly why I find them so amazingly fascinating!!
Using live departure and arrival boards, the airline sites and simply just the flight number in to Google and these two sites you are your own flight manager, it really is amazing. Try it!
Start with a major airport in the UK or Europe and just click around on a few flight numbers and allow yourself to ask some questions, what aircraft, where is it going and press some buttons!! You've lost nothing except a couple of minutes and hey you might even appreciate exactly why I find them so amazingly fascinating!!
On a different level altogether though there are in
fact some hidden goodies with sites such as this. Seeing the amount of aircraft
flying at any one time would surely make anybody who was nervous of flying reassured
that if it was that unsafe you would hear of fatal accidents every single hour
of every single day. Leading credence to the fact that you have more chance of
being kicked to death by a donkey on the beach of your destination than dying
in a plane crash on the way there.
Looking at these sites it is obvious that if you
were to follow any one of these little animated aircraft for its whole journey or even just part of it
you would inevitably learn a little bit or maybe even a lot about the geography
of this wonderful globe of ours. Use them in the landscape mode and its not
that different to Google earth with emphasis of course on the busiest airports
of the world!
Oh and I haven’t even told you about the ‘cockpit
view’ but if you are a geek like me you will find those out, almost as a matter
of course!
Ok got to go my son’s flight is just 2½ hours from
landing in Singapore and I need to look through the window and ponder as to why
it is running 17 minutes late!!
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