I understand advertisement revenue (though the page doesn’t show me any ads), but I see they have paid plans, which offers additional details like tail numbers and weather information. Who is paying for this information? And what makes it worth their while to retrieve and store this data?
In: Economics
It’s not just tail numbers and weather. You can search for a specific plane and then see its past flights. And, you can replay any of those flights with full ‘trick play’ features like play at x speed multiple, pause, rewind, jump to any point in the flight. I can imagine some of this being useful to aircraft owners for various reasons, but…
Plane nerds pay for this (ask me how I know) – I think it’s only $35 a year. It can be interesting to look at the flight paths of the aerial survey planes ‘mowing the lawn’ over one place or another. And, the flights of airshow planes or sporting event flyover planes, classic planes, replay the data from a flight that included some sort of incident, see who’s flying where in really odd locations like the far, far north, watch the air combat training guys exercise out over the pacific, watch the amazing dance of all of the various aircraft involved in fighting a wildfire, watch the planes involved in space launches (think Pegasus or StarshipOne).
To me it’s a better value than, say, an HBO subscription.
Very useful for A&P mechanics to track planes coming in for maintenance, especially if you work at an MRO.
Flight Aware is extremely useful for smaller companies, flight schools, private owners, among others, to track their aircraft and provide other data services. Those commercial services are what funds the majority of the company.
[Check out their website for the different options](https://www.flightaware.com/commercial/)
If you run a FBO (basically a convenience store + gas station for private pilots), you can use it to check how many planes are coming to your airport, what types of planes, and when they’re scheduled to arrive. I imagine you can also get historical data so you can plan when your busy and less busy periods are. Very useful data for a business owner.
my wife and i discovered flight aware sitting in our hot tub at night and looking at the sky, just wondering what planes go by and where they’re headed. then we started using it to check any random plane or helicopter we see if we’re curious. i’m often subbed to it to mostly to get rid of ads, but also sometimes to replay old flights. it’s cheap.
Latest Answers