Tracking a particular flight while away from PC?

[GlynH]

Well here's one for those that know about such things...

My girlfriend is off to Australia on Thursday for a 3 week trip and I will of course be dropping her off at Heathrow (just to make sure she leaves the country!:-)

Now I won't make it back home in time to track her flight so I was wondering if/how the RadarBox could be set to record any & all details of her flight in my absence?

Having never done anything like this before I thought I'd throw it out to you guys...

Obviously I won't be able to track her over the ocean (unless there are a string of RB owning sailors strategically placed:-) but she is flying Qantas to Singapore and then on to Brisbane if that's any help?

I don't usually monitor any network flights preferring to see what my RB 'sees' but I'm gonna make an exception this time so how best to go about it please?

Any hints/tips etc would be much appreciated.

Thanks & kind regards,
-=Glyn=-

[Storm]

I would love to know if that's possible too.

[Allocator]

OK, there are a number of options here - as long as you are happy to leave your PC on while you are away.

- You can set RadarBox to Record before you leave the house.  A couple of problems here, as the Record function only records Live traffic and not Network traffic, so you might miss the aircraft.  Also, with one version of the RadarBox software, the Record function didn't work - can't remember, but it might be V1.5 - this has definitely been sorted with the latest version of the yet to be released V1.6  The good part with the record replay is that you have full functionality of the RB interface, so you can zoom, pan and click on aircraft etc.

- You can use a time-lapse screen capture program to capture your screen at certain time intervals.  I use iQuick Quick Screenshot Maker for this to either capture just the map or the whole screen.  The disadvantage with this is that you will just have a series of pictures to look at and you won't be able to interact with the RB interface.

- You could always take RB with you to Heathrow if you have a laptop and sit in a supermarket or hotel car park and watch the flight depart and follow it as far as you can.

- If you are really keen, you could book into one of the Heathrow hotels at a daytime spotters rate - I've seem mention of this but don't know the details.  The hotels usually have WiFi so you could view network traffic too!  Of course, this will probably be impractical if you are on any type of timescale :-)

Whatever you do, do remember the "mission" is to get your girlfriend to the airport on time - she might not share your enthusiasm about the importance of tracking her flight!

[tarbat]

Whilst not a Radarbox solution, I've used http://www.openatc.com/ in the past to see a recording of my wife's flight from Inverness to London.  As long as you know the flight number (or part of it), just goto http://www.openatc.com/findflights.asp?search=EZY22 (for all flights starting EZY22...), and look for the flight she was on.

The results in Google Earth are quite good:



It's a shame http://www.airnavlive.com/ doesn't offer a recording function.

And http://www.flightstats.com/ is useful for checking actual landing times, etc.