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.
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