Route Decoding?

[Mark in CA]

My wife is about to take off on AZ 630 from LIRF/FCO to KMIA, and Flightaware displays the routing as

SIFEN 2600N 07000W MILLE ZQA FLIPR3

The graphic of her planned flight shows a strange leg from Rome up to London and then down to Portugal before heading westward to Miami. It also lists the distance as Direct: 5,181 sm, Planned: 6,359 sm, which seems like a lot of extra miles, to me.

Is there some Internet resource that decodes this kind of routing information?

Just curious. Have never taken this flight myself.

[KelvinD]

Looking at recent tracks, it doesn't go near London.
The route seems to take it over Barcelona, towards Madrid, then some days crosses the Atlantic coast near Lisbon and on other days, avoids Portugal and crosses Galicia.

[DaveReidUK]

The route seems to take it over Barcelona, towards Madrid, then some days crosses the Atlantic coast near Lisbon and on other days, avoids Portugal and crosses Galicia.FlightAware is getting confused. It shows a route dog-legging over Brecon instead of Barcelona.

Both locations have VORs that share the same identifier - BCN - presumably the cause of the confusion.

[Mark in CA]

Thanks, all. The actual flight path appears to be as you described.

Also interesting to note, the flight event log shows the airport authorities establishing active status for the flight and setting the actual departure time to 10:41. About three minutes later, it shows the airline setting the departure time back to 10:35 (scheduled departure time was 10:30). Then, 35 minutes after this, the airport sets it back to 10:41 again. Might this have something to do with on-time departure statistics?

[DaveReidUK]

Overhead Barcelona about now.

Confusingly, the flight does sometimes overfly the southern UK, though the most recent instance seems to have been a couple of months ago, when it could have been seen over the other BCN. :O

[PAXboy]

In the (lengthy) thread in Rumours & News on the Air Asia thread as some very good explanations about FR24 and why the aircraft icon sometimes jumps or 'dances'. Look at the thread 'backwards' to find.

[DaveReidUK]

Yes, but that's not the issue here.

It's the planned route that's being shown with the unfeasible dog-leg, not the purported actual position of the aircraft, though as far as the latter is concerned FlightAware suffers from the same limitations as FlightRadar24, for the same reasons.

[Mark in CA]

It seems that Flightaware does offer decoding for some of the routes, offering a (Decode) link next to the routing info, as this link shows for the routing my step-daughter's flight took yesterday from DCA to MIA:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AAL1179/history/20150108/1940Z/KDCA/KMIA/route