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  • Second guessing destination airport -Why?

    Why are you second guessing the destination airport when you don't have flight details or a flight plan? For General Aviation and especially private aircraft it almost never makes sense.

    It seems at if you assume the aircraft will make the trip to where ever it came from last, but there is absolutely no reason why that should the case. So we Pipers and Cessnas clearly heading in the opposite direction of your guess.

    Why not stop doing that?

  • #2
    Originally posted by Kpin View Post
    Why are you second guessing the destination airport when you don't have flight details or a flight plan? For General Aviation and especially private aircraft it almost never makes sense.

    It seems at if you assume the aircraft will make the trip to where ever it came from last, but there is absolutely no reason why that should the case. So we Pipers and Cessnas clearly heading in the opposite direction of your guess.

    Why not stop doing that?
    I don't think FR24 collate airport, flight and airline data - it is purchased from other providers and some of it is of pretty lousy quality. There is little evidence that flight plans play much part in the process. I don't like plugging competing products on forums but while FR24 easily provides the best coverage and visual experience, Flight Aware has much better data. You really need to use both programs and maybe other sources as well.

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    • #3
      Where no lodged flightplan exists from their provider I believe it uses closest-receiver to log to/from. (The guess in this case)

      Often you see smaller non commercials have a origin only and ??? As dest. Until it gets nearer one and loses contact.

      This poses a problem down the line as it appears to then save this flight log against either the aircraft or squawked callsign and populated the next flight the same

      Plenty of trainers here in nz for instance fly with the reg as callsign and the route is forever changing but also wrong based on 'last seen doing'

      Sent from my XT1092 using Tapatalk
      Posts not to be taken as official support representation - Just a helpful uploader who tinkers

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Kpin View Post
        Why are you second guessing the destination airport when you don't have flight details or a flight plan? For General Aviation and especially private aircraft it almost never makes sense.

        It seems at if you assume the aircraft will make the trip to where ever it came from last, but there is absolutely no reason why that should the case. So we Pipers and Cessnas clearly heading in the opposite direction of your guess.

        Why not stop doing that?
        We get data from many different data sources including booking systems, schedules, airlines, airports, flight plans and some ANSP's. Coverage is very different depending on traffic type, region and many other parameters. For regular passenger flights we probably get routes for 99%+ of flights, for charters maybe 70-90% and for cargo 60-80%. In some cases we also get routes for smaller aircraft and for example Cessna 208 is very often used for different type of scheduled flights. So it's not possible to say that one or another aircraft type is not getting any schedules.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Mike View Post
          We get data from many different data sources including booking systems, schedules, airlines, airports, flight plans and some ANSP's. Coverage is very different depending on traffic type, region and many other parameters. For regular passenger flights we probably get routes for 99%+ of flights, for charters maybe 70-90% and for cargo 60-80%. In some cases we also get routes for smaller aircraft and for example Cessna 208 is very often used for different type of scheduled flights. So it's not possible to say that one or another aircraft type is not getting any schedules.
          But In some cases you are just guessing. I fly privately in Cessna 172 and Piper 32R and often without any declared destination. In some cases I haven't made up my mind until in the air. Still I can see that you expect me to go to wherever I went last. And when I land somewhere you stubbornly declare that I diverted to that place.
          Independently of aircraft type I see no reason to give a destination if you have not received that information from a source.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Mike View Post
            We get data from many different data sources including booking systems, schedules, airlines, airports, flight plans and some ANSP's. Coverage is very different depending on traffic type, region and many other parameters. For regular passenger flights we probably get routes for 99%+ of flights, for charters maybe 70-90% and for cargo 60-80%. In some cases we also get routes for smaller aircraft and for example Cessna 208 is very often used for different type of scheduled flights. So it's not possible to say that one or another aircraft type is not getting any schedules.
            A lot of those sources are providing you with complete trash though. The site seems to have gone in a different direction over this past few years where you now seem to aiming for quantity over quality, and it shows (and not in a good way).

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            • #7
              Maybe Flightradar24 can add something on the page that they are second guessing the airport it took off or landed at for the aircraft.
              Last edited by SoCalBrian; 2017-08-19, 22:37.
              Brian

              www.RadarSpotters.eu
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              • #8
                [QUOTE=Kpin;95029 And when I land somewhere you stubbornly declare that I diverted to that place.
                [/QUOTE]

                A variation on "diversions" particularly irks me. I live close to the city of Toowoomba in Australia which has two airports. Their IATA codes are TWB and WTB. TWB is a general aviation airport while WTB gets all the scheduled airline flights and some of the GA. Flights operated by one particular airline regularly show as being diverted from WTB to TWB notwithstanding that the aircraft type could not safely land at TWB. I suspect that the "diversion" is caused by someone, somewhere entering the wrong choice of one of two similar airport codes.

                Likewise a charter airline regularly flies from Brisbane and Adelaide to a remote oil and gas facility called Ballera (BBL) but FR24 shows it as going to Batman (BAL), an airport in Turkey. This is an obvious example of someone guessing that BAL might be the code for Ballera. It might be better if they used the four character ICAO codes because they are more distinctive than the three character IATA ones eg Toowomba City YTWB, Toowoomba West Wellcamp YBBW, Ballera YLLE, Batman LTCJ.

                I know of no currently available means to notify errors like these within FR24.

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                • #9
                  Here we have OY-POZ, a Piper 28 on its way to the north west. GTI (Rügen) is down in the southeast corner. And OY-POZ did not start from RKE (Roskilde) but from EKRS (Ringsted). It is actually based in Roskilde and that might have something to do with the guess.
                  OYPOZ.JPG

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                  • #10
                    Suspect thats a case of 'closest receiver signal near x airport'

                    It thinks it takes off from there all the time, no mention of Ringsted https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/oy-poz
                    Posts not to be taken as official support representation - Just a helpful uploader who tinkers

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                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Tyke's Aero blog View Post
                      A lot of those sources are providing you with complete trash though. The site seems to have gone in a different direction over this past few years where you now seem to aiming for quantity over quality, and it shows (and not in a good way).
                      Yes, I know that you think that everything we do is trash, shit, bad and sucks. But we have a big team of developers working daily on improving data quality and we are today matching up to 96-99.5% of flights (depending on region), with correct route, compared to about 82-92% one year ago.

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                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Mike View Post
                        Yes, I know that you think that everything we do is trash, shit, bad and sucks. But we have a big team of developers working daily on improving data quality and we are today matching up to 96-99.5% of flights (depending on region), with correct route, compared to about 82-92% one year ago.
                        Would that "big team of developers" be roughly the same size as the "big team of database editors" ?

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                        • #13
                          Originally posted by Mike View Post
                          Yes, I know that you think that everything we do is trash, shit, bad and sucks. But we have a big team of developers working daily on improving data quality and we are today matching up to 96-99.5% of flights (depending on region), with correct route, compared to about 82-92% one year ago.
                          I don't doubt 96%+ for RPT traffic ie larger airlines flying the same route day after day. But there is much more aviation going on than that. While it would be unreasonable to expect accurate data for private flights that often do not even lodge a flight plan, there are countless other commercial flights where plans are always lodged even for very short flights. Many of these, like the ones to Ballera that I quoted in an earlier post, operate regularly just not to a rigid timetable. They also oten have fixed fight numbers. The error I quoted with the destination shown as a Turkish airport is not recent - it has been evident for at least two years. I would have thought that such an error could have been corrected in that time. Please remember that there seems to be no way to notify these errors to FR24.

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                          • #14
                            Matching routes is very, very, very complex. Maybe it sounds easy to match UAL100 to UA100, but there are thousands if not millions of exceptions which makes life hard for anyone trying to get the routes correct. For a person in most cases it can look obvious that a route is not correct but for a computer it's not as easy. For a human watching a screen and knowing knowing same basic facts about the aircraft or the flight or pattern or livery it's easy to know were this flight should be heading even if some of the data is missing or incorrect, but it's not as easy for a computer.

                            One very basic problems is that the computer don't know if the flight is a passenger flight, a cargo flight, a charter flight, a test flight, a position flight, if a flight plan has been filed, if it's an IFR or VFR flight, etc. For a computer that only can see a callsign, and possibly can look upp that the aircraft is a Cessna 208, it doesn't help much in understanding what type of flight this is. By not knowing that makes it very hard to know which rules should be used to match the route.

                            On top of that there are many other things that make matching complicated including alphanumeric callsign (RYR17GR, EZY9HJ and so one), airlines using "incorrect" callsigns for example KLM710 for flight KL235, or WZZ1234 for flight W62255 (who came up with this idea?), incorrect callsigns SBS123 instead of SAS123 (fat finger syndrome), usage of registration instead of assigned callsign (SZ-YAA instead of LNK8850), usage of same flight number for 3-4-5 or even 6 flights. Another growing problem is all the airlines doing flights for other airlines and mixing callsigns (one flight is LOT callsign, next flight is Nordica callsign), flights using IATA code instead of ICAO code as callsign (for example Australian doctors using AM-callsign). To make things even more funny, airlines in US airlines have started to use random flight numbers instead of reusing same number for same route.

                            We have a team that is working on improving the quality of route matching and we are also working on getting as many data sources as well. We are tracking the progress and we can see that we are making improvments every month, but we will for sure never have 100% data quality.

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by airnrail View Post
                              I don't doubt 96%+ for RPT traffic ie larger airlines flying the same route day after day. But there is much more aviation going on than that. While it would be unreasonable to expect accurate data for private flights that often do not even lodge a flight plan, there are countless other commercial flights where plans are always lodged even for very short flights. Many of these, like the ones to Ballera that I quoted in an earlier post, operate regularly just not to a rigid timetable. They also oten have fixed fight numbers. The error I quoted with the destination shown as a Turkish airport is not recent - it has been evident for at least two years. I would have thought that such an error could have been corrected in that time. Please remember that there seems to be no way to notify these errors to FR24.
                              The number is actuallt around 60-70% globally and this is where we started 5-6 years ago. Since then we have been working on improving the quality and we have now reached about 96-99%. As we track about 150.000 - 180.000 flights per day. Making it possible to change occasional flights wouldn't even make it noticable in the statistics, and it would only mess things up for the computer trying to learn the routes.

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