Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
I don't think that's what the OP is referring to.
FR24 often shows, for a given aircraft registration, flights that are planned hours, or even days, in the future.
I've often wondered, too, where that information comes from, as it often turns out to be wrong - its clearly not from a transponder.
Thanks Dave. Yes that's what I was referring to, coupled with the fact that sometimes for a given aircraft that scheduled data is not updated until the another aircraft is allocated to the flight and doors are shut, and that maybe as happened today, the bad data persists for a couple of hours after it has became physically impossible for the original aircraft to operate on the flight. Today that was because for those two hours it had been heading away from the departure point on a totally different flight!
FR24 is of course no longer a toy. What it means is that any passenger attempting to verify that their aircraft will be on time may need to be quite lateral in analysing where their aircraft may be if not already on the ground. Said pax also has to be quite novel in recognising data that must be discarded and hunting down the correct answer by elimination and deduction!
Aside from where FR24 gets the sometimes superceded data, I am pleased to report how my little delay prediction investigation today did however impress me when seeing how Ryanair has built schedules which not only allow for variable flight times, but can also be juggled at short notice to mitigate variable delays. What was approaching a three hour departure delay at Stansted caused a knock on arrival delay at another destination later in the evening of less than an hour I think. Quite beautiful to behold really, and I got told off for telling my friends they might be delayed because their aircraft was still three hours away when they had been called to board! 'O ye of little faith' they said as they boarded on time!
I guess the size of the fleet helps, but remember it didn't involve using any "spare" aircraft, just well planned use of what I guess is planned-in slack as might be possible at a particular base when an inbound is seen to be very late..