1/8 Extra: Flight Tracker Online
 

http://www.digipulse.org/images/jen-flight.jpg

That's a picture of my sister's flight to Phoenix (where she'll then depart from on her way to California), updated in real time. It was taken from http://www.trip.com - they provide the serivce for free, and you can track any flight (I imagine).

The neat thing about this really is that it's updated in real-time - speed, heading, etc. The picture at the top shows how far they are along on the trip. The bigger picture actually updates every few seconds, showing how far the plane has progressed. It's all done in Java, and very nicely, I might add. So I get to watch my sister land and, later, take off again.

security issues?
 

I'm the last person that's going to get paranoid about things post-9/11, but couldn't this be used by terrorists in some way? Someone please tell me I'm full of it...

mh

Unless the terrorists have f14's and want to find the plane and shoot it down themselves, I don't really see how. Usually if they want to take down a plane they have to board it themselves before it takes off.

surface to air missles?

Thanks for this great site reference, dham.

Here's the direct link to the FlightTracker.

So you've got a kook in the desert with a cell phone hooked up to a laptop as opposed to waiting for a call from his buddy inside the airport staring at the monitor to let him know that the plane left on time.

Besides, that plane image is a wee bit out of scale on that map. :) And there's no coordinates.

It'd be just as easy to do something malicious with that information as without it.