In May, Simple Flying launched our own flight tracker. Built as a flight tracker for avgeeks, it shows everything from NOTAMs to military aircraft, statistics, and more. While flying from Frankfurt Airport (FRA) to Montreal Airport (YUL) with Air Canada, I decided to put the flight tracker to the ultimate test, tracking my own flight from 40,000 feet.

I found that the in-flight entertainment map kept going to sleep on my flight. You needed to periodically re-tap the screen to reactivate it. Instead, I found myself fixed to watching my flight while working from the plane in cruise. In fact, I didn’t watch a single TV episode or movie.

Following My Flight

Credit: Simple Flying

The most basic feature of any flight tracker is seeing where an aircraft is in its journey at any given time. This was the main feature that I used our own flight tracker for. I love staring out of the window over Western Europe and the UK, and I know the geography well enough that I can typically place where the plane is. However, you can never look straight down, and without tracking our flight, I’d have never seen that we flew directly over the town I grew up in.

Now you could argue that I could use the in-flight map for this purpose. The resolution of the map on Air Canada’s Boeing 787-8 was enough that I could make out where we were over the country, but not with the detail of exactly which streets I was flying over. Additionally, when feeling the plane turn, I could see where we were going and why.

Filtering Helped Me See My Arrival Routing

Simple Flying’s flight tracker allows people to filter by airline, airport, altitude, and more. For the last hour or so of my flight, as we were flying along the St Lawrence River, I filtered the map to only show Montreal arrivals. This allowed me to see a couple of things.

Firstly, I followed the route that other arrivals were taking to see which runway we would most likely land on. Unfortunately, this showed that we were likely to land on 24R, meaning that I would not see our parent company’s offices from the window. This turned out to be a correct assumption.

Additionally, I could monitor which other aircraft were landing ahead of us, indicating how many planes would likely land before us, and which ones might come after us. Thankfully, as my flight was approaching Montreal, I could see that there was not a lot of traffic ahead of us, meaning we had a fairly straight arrival.

What Else Does Our Flight Tracker Offer?

Credit: Russ Heinl | Shutterstock

Our flight tracker is currently a Beta release, and new features are being added to it weekly based on feedback by our readers. For example, since launch, we have added the possibility to filter by route and/or airline. These filters show in the URL, alongside latitude, longitude, and zoom, meaning you can now bookmark a quick link to your favorite view.

Some other things that set our flight tracker apart include the ability to see which altitude and stage of flight an aircraft is in. There are also visual NOTAMs across the map, and did we mention that aircraft completing erratic movements are shown as alerts? If you haven’t already, try our Flight Tracker now! What are you waiting for?