FlyingMonkey wrote:
Don, personally I would not rely on FlightAware for much of anything. I have found their data to be very unreliable. I have not seen airplanes in their site that I know for a fact were in primary radar coverage and using flight following. Not sure whay their data is so sketchy, but in my experience it is.
"Your mileage may vary."
We all have our own experiences and observations. For what it's worth, my experience has been different. It might be that I'm usually on an IFR flight plan, so I'm the guy punching in my tail number, and not somebody at FSS or ATC who might have fat-fingered my call sign. It might be that my part of the country has way more sources of data feeding into FlightAware's system so that I'm almost never "off the grid". It might be because I've lived a righteous life, and karma smiles upon me (that seems highly unlikely to me). Who really knows.
When I first started flying in 2009, I'd have agreed with you that FA's data was pretty sketchy and unreliable. But over the years, in my experience, it's gotten very noticeably better, such that now it's pretty unusual to notice a gap or error in FA's tracks for me.
Over that time, FA's been growing their network of ADSB-in receivers, and I installed an ADSB-out transponder, and I think both of those things contributed to their improved tracking of me.
But another thing that helped is changing a setting in my account to "Show position-only flights." FA used to warn you that this can introduce less-reliable data (which implies that they tend to err on the side of omitting data that they have doubts about). However, in my experience this substantailly increases the chances that they'll capture my flight and show it to me on flights where I don't file a flight plan or talk to ATC.
I was just about to provide instructions on how to enable that setting, but it's not there anymore. According to the FA FAQ, that feature has become reliable enough that it is now normal behavior for all users.
So, if your comment about finding FA unreliable is based on recent observations, then I guess this post is worthless and I apologize for the noise.
But if you formed an opinion on FA's tracking reliability some time ago, then it might be worth re-evaluating today, and into the future. They are continuously improving.