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When driving to work I pass by St. John's Catholic Church. The church sits high on a hill west of Marietta and when you pass it you have an unobstructed view east. Frequently on cold mornings the crisp air is punctuated by the contrails of jets heading west.
My first thought the other day was how did all the people get up, get to the airport two hours early, go through their TSA screening, board an aircraft and manage to get to 30,000 feet when all I have done is get in my car and drive a few miles.
My second thought is where in the heck is everyone going, where did they come from, and for some reason, I sometimes wonder what kind of plane they are on. If they are flying at altitude, they are around 7 miles away. Even with binoculars it is going to be hard to get very much information on them.
There are ways for the curious among us to get an idea of what flights are passing over our heads. FlightAware.com tracks all flights as they fly between airports. The data from those flights is available for anyone to see, in real time, as the flight passes overhead. You can also track, if you are so inclined, a particular flight. You have likely seen FlightAware screens on news reports about air travel around the holidays. You can view it either on the web or through an app.
Let's take for example Alaska Airlines flight ASA8 B738. The flight passed over Marietta the other day at around 4 p.m. It passes over Marietta every day at around the same time. After leaving San Francisco at 8:41 in the morning it was nearly done with its cross-country journey to Washington Reagan Airport when it flew over.
The plane would be on the ground 35 minutes later. When it passed over Marietta it was at 37,000 feet and traveling at 667 miles per hour.
The Boeing 737-800 used on the flight uses two pilots and four flight attendants. It can carry up to 159 passengers who pay anywhere from $179 to $1,909 for a seat.
All that information is available to anyone with a web browser.
According to the FAA, there are 45,000 flights and 2.9 million airline passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace every day. There can be as many as 5,400 flights over the United States at any one time.
FlightAware provides a wealth of information on every flight in the air. It pulls information from data that is available to everyone. A young college student named Jack Sweeny got in hot water in 2022 when he refused to delete a Twitter account that used this publicly available data that tracked when the plane carrying Elon Musk took off and landed. After Musk bought Twitter, he suspended the account.
Flights are not the only thing that are tracked by websites and made available to anyone with a computer or a smartphone.
Ship travel, and even barge traffic, is also tracked. The next time you are sitting at the levee and wonder about the barge that you are watching pass by, fire up the website shiptraffic.net and you can view what is traveling down the river.
Barge traffic is normally a little easier to figure out than flights. Barges move at about four miles per hour. You can typically see what they are carrying, and you know which direction they are traveling. View busy areas, like the New York Harbor on the site, and you will get a better understanding of just how congested our shipping centers are.