[OSM-talk] flight paths

[Dave Hansen]

On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 14:26 +0100, Jon Stockill wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
> > Official flight path data would probably be the better route, if it's
> > available (might be restricted due to paranoia over security).
> 
> Thankfully people are still a little bit more paranoid over safety. All 
> the data is published - though the costs involved in getting data for 
> any particular country varies greatly.

Some pretty coarse data are available here:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL333/history/20070812/2336Z/KDEN/KPDX
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL333/history/20070812/2336Z/KDEN/KPDX/tracklog

Although, I do kinda doubt how useful this will actually be to anyone.
I just took at the exact same flight on ten different days:

	http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL722/history

and opened in 10 browser tabs and flipped between them.  Some of them
have pretty close flight paths, but most of them move around a fair bit
and very few even appear identical.

As I write this, there are 5,200 airborn aircraft in the US.  I think
that makes an awfully tangled web if we started to plot them.

-- Dave