Historical Flight Track information

[SixPapaCharlie]

I used to not be super specific when Logging flights and I want to clean up an old logbook.

I see Flight Aware will sell you your flight history as far back as 1998 I believe for nearly a grand.
This tells me the data is available somewhere and I suspect they are not paying that for it.
I am looking for data on a couple of specific flights from 2014.

Does anyone know where the source data exists. Paying Flight Aware can't be the only option.

Thx.

 

[eman1200]

if anyone knows who's tracking you it's @EdFred

 

[EdFred]

if anyone knows who's tracking you it's @EdFred

Ha, I actually went back to 2014 and 2015 to views flights I knew I took a look on one of the "we will show everyone" and nothing exists...probably because I didn't have ADS-B at the time.

 

[Sam D]

I used to not be super specific when Logging flights and I want to clean up an old logbook.

I see Flight Aware will sell you your flight history as far back as 1998 I believe for nearly a grand.
This tells me the data is available somewhere and I suspect they are not paying that for it.
I am looking for data on a couple of specific flights from 2014.

Does anyone know where the source data exists. Paying Flight Aware can't be the only option.

Thx.

I hope you realize that there is a whole unit at a self-storage facility labelled as "Bryan Turner's past flights" just waiting for you to pick it up. In fact, if you don't pay the grand, they're going to bring over the Storage Wars guys and one of them is going to end up with it.

 

[rwellner98]

I used to not be super specific when Logging flights and I want to clean up an old logbook.

I see Flight Aware will sell you your flight history as far back as 1998 I believe for nearly a grand.
This tells me the data is available somewhere and I suspect they are not paying that for it.
I am looking for data on a couple of specific flights from 2014.

Does anyone know where the source data exists. Paying Flight Aware can't be the only option.

Short story long, because I'm old and like the only benefit to being old is remembering things...

<long story>Dan Baker, the CEO of flight aware, was a principle at distributed.net. Distributed.net was a very early cloud computing kind of a thing designed to take donated cycles and look like AWS for a few special interest workloads. Some of the people from there founded a company called United Devices, which was an attempt to commercialize idea like that and later evolved into an unreleased product for doing workload/workflow management. In 2007 Univa (where I was the Chief Scientist) bought UD and I rearchitected the UD product into a new tool we called Reliance. Some of the people from dnet followed Dan to his startup and a couple went there after we bought UD. As a result I talked with some of the people there and heard about their plans and how they were doing things.</long story>

<short story>Their business prop is learning more about the various government data feeds than the governments themselves know. They reverse engineer everything and as a result get results that not even the data sources can reproduce accurately. And a lot of the data is in formats that haven't been overhauled in decades, so would make you cry if you had to write code to extract it into something useful. It's not like there is a python library to take EBCDIC flight logs and parse them into something useful that takes into account the various bugs in the various code bases used from year to year. The source data isn't expensive (IIRC), but the engineering to make it useful has cost tens of millions of dollars over the lifetime of the company. You wouldn't have a prayer.</short story>

tl;dr If you have a use case worth a thousand bucks, give the money to flight aware. If you don't, the data isn't available to you.

 

[Checkout_my_Six]

Do you really need those extra hours to log?

 

[masloki]

Maybe, just maybe, if the flights included ATC you could go via the FAA and a Freedom of Information Act request.

FlightAware is hit or miss without ADS-B tracking. And I’m pretty sure my company is one of their top accounts but their responsiveness has really slid this year. Perhaps they are suffering integration malaise.

 

[texasclouds]

Stop by your friendly fizdo and ask for the file.

 

[Van Johnston]

I see Flight Aware will sell you your flight history as far back as 1998 I believe for nearly a grand.

I am looking for data on a couple of specific flights from 2014.

I think FA did not have their own crowd-sourced ADS-B feed yet in 2014, and you probably weren't flying an ADS-B equipped plane anyway, so unless you were on an IFR flight, it's doubtful FA has the flight.

For a grand you could probably just re-fly the flights.

 

[Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe]

For a grand you could probably just re-fly the flights.

For nothing you could just write whatever seems reasonable and not sweat the details.

 

[Timbeck2]

Maybe, just maybe, if the flights included ATC you could go via the FAA and a Freedom of Information Act request

Only those flights in the last 15-45 days would be available, unless he crashes, then it’s kept for longer

 

[dans2992]

ADSBexchange.com has details back to early 2020.

 

[Jim_R]

Only those flights in the last 15-45 days would be available, unless he crashes, then it’s kept for longer

You suppose they're just making up the data they're offering to sell you for the past 10+ years?


They've got 24 years of flights for my tail #:

 

[Timbeck2]

He said if ATC was involved. I assumed he meant audio

 

[Jim_R]

He said if ATC was involved. I assumed he meant audio

I assumed he meant Flight Following or an IFR flight plan. FA doesn't capture audio. Regardless, if FA has the flights, they don't delete them after 15-45 days.

 

[masloki]

I assumed he meant Flight Following or an IFR flight plan. FA doesn't capture audio. Regardless, if FA has the flights, they don't delete them after 15-45 days.

I was thinking radar tracks more than audio but I’m just SGOTI.

 

[Half Fast]

Well, considering it’s 6PC, it might be simpler to just request the records from the courthouse....

 

[Jim_R]

I was thinking radar tracks more than audio but I’m just SGOTI.

Yes, and unless he was equipped with ADSB-out in 2014, he'd have needed to establish FF or be on an IFR plan for ATC to tie an N-number to the track. Otherwise, he'd just be an anonymous 1200 transponder ping.

 

[RussR]

@SixPapaCharlie , if you're just trying to enter a missing flight in your logbook, I'd just do my honest best to remember the details and enter them.

Are you needing this flight for a new rating or something?

 

[Brad Z]

Yes, and unless he was equipped with ADSB-out in 2014, he'd have needed to establish FF or be on an IFR plan for ATC to tie an N-number to the track. Otherwise, he'd just be an anonymous 1200 transponder ping.

Pre-2018ish, even flight following wasn’t a guaranteed track on FlightAware. I think it depended on how the controller put you in the system and whether it was a flight plan that extended beyond that facility’s airspace. I often used to file IfR if for no other reason than to allow my destination ride to track my flight. And coming out of the DC FRZ, I was always on a flight plan to the SFRA edge and on flight following nearly 100% of the time.

 

[Brad Z]

@SixPapaCharlie , if you're just trying to enter a missing flight in your logbook, I'd just do my honest best to remember the details and enter them.

Are you needing this flight for a new rating or something?

I think he’s trying to log Josh Flower’s flight time over the last 8 years.

 

[Dave Theisen]

When I saw that OP was @SixPapaCharlie, I read the title as Hysterical Flight Track record.