| REVIEWS
Cruising
Cyberspace
Web
Site Pick Of The Month
By Pam Wegmann
If you travel by
air, for business or pleasure, you have probably on an occasion or two
found yourself rushing to the airport worrying that you will miss your
flight. You’ve called the airline and the agent said your flight
is on time. Yet, when you arrive, you find that there was no need
to rush because the incoming flight will be dreadfully late. The
agent didn’t lie to you. He just had bad information. However,
you could have the correct information if you go online to
http://www.trip.com/trs/trip/flighttracker/flight_tracker_home.xsl
This is a sub-page
of the trip.com site, a travel portal where you can book airline, hotel
and rental car reservations. The flight tracker is probably the best feature
of this site, and definitely the coolest.
The feature tracks,
in real time, airborne flights anywhere in North America. There is
a graphical version and a text version in case the user has difficulty
seeing the graphics or his or her computer and/or connection are too slow.
There are three options.
One is to track a random flight. Click on the track flight button,and
an airborne flight and applicable map load.
More likely, however,
one will want to know about a particular flight. In this case, scroll
down a little and select an airline from the pull-down menu and then enter
the flight number. Up will pop a graphic display showing a bird’s
eye view of the plane against a map of its current location, along with
nearby cities for reference. You’ll be able to watch the little
plane inch across the map on your screen, heading toward its destination.
Above the map are three gauges showing the speed, altitude, and compass
heading. Below those are the city of departure and time, and arrival
city and true time. Click your Refresh button to update the gauge
readings.
Not sure of the flight
number? You can also track by city and time.
Choosing this option
by clicking the continue button from the above URL, let’s you enter from
a pull down menu the departure and arrival cities, and either approximate
arrival or departure time.
You will then get
a text list of all potential relevant flights, the airline and flight numbers,
time of departure, estimated time of arrival, status (in flight or landed),
the current location, altitude, speed, and type of plane. For each
flight listed, there is a little icon you can click on to then see the
flight displayed graphically.
With today’s crowded
skies and frequent late departures, this site comes in very handy for managing
your time, instead of the airline doing so. (Incidentally, I was
told the data for this site actually comes from the cockpits of the airplanes
themselves.) Now if the airlines could only get their phone and gate agents
hooked to it.
Knowledge is Power!
:-)
May 2001
Questions/Comments
can be sent to pam@info-matters.com
or faxed to 504.738.0016. You can also reach Ms. Wegmann at 504.738.0070.
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