Bored & on Flightradar24.com

I've been tracking CSN305, China Southern Airlines Airbus A330, out of Guangzhou en route to Auckland, earlier I was watching CSN386 from Tokyo Narita to Guangzhou.

Just staring at one plane icon on the screen palls quickly, even when bringing a pretty Russian woman ever closer to me :P

So I went browsing around to see what else was around on doing laps.

ZK-DMW from the North Shore Aero Club seems to be doing cross-country training.

Over by Melbourne, VH-ITK has done a bunch of looping circuts of some place near Morrabin, and a long cross country hop, VH-OIS must be training, no cross country, just round and round again through the circuit. 24-7979 is having fun buzzing over to Rythdale and back, and is currently headed to Seaford on the coast...

Over to the west, VH-WHQ has given up curcuits and has struck off to the SES, long straight tracj like he/she has a destination in mind rather than a scenic meander like VH-NRA further west over some place called Lethbridge.

Interesting spying on others off for their flights...

It's a reasonable day for flying here looking outside, and once Ms FromRussiaWithLove flies home in a couple of weeks I'll be selling the car I picked up cheap for her to use while here so not to be nailed down by bus schedules while I work, and taking the money down to the Rangitata island aerodrome to join the Geraldine Flying Group and my first training flights there.

In the runup bay this morning - ITK on my right and OIS on my left.

That is great. I am a slow learner and had never seen flight radar before. Spent a while today with it. Can you tell me how it tracks and IDs an aircraft which is squawking 1200? I guess a flight plan has been lodged and the aircraft ID'd with the blip tagged, but how? In the old days you had to make a turn to get ID'd.

And if I can have a supplementary question - I watched 24-7078 which brought up a photo of a tecnam P92 with that Rego but the ID panel in Flightradar said Aeroprakt A22-LS. Where does it get that data, and why is one of them wrong?

I don't know much about the site,

I do know that it is based on ADS-B data, if you look at the "help us" pages, they show how you can hook up a ground based ADS-B-in system to your internet to send the data captured to their site.

So what shows on the site would depend on what the ADS-B-out on the plane is sending. The plane rego and aircraft data would be what is entered in the transmitter I think?

Most of the private planes I saw on the site over NZ here tracked in the NZ CAA registry as school and/or club planes, I suppose that private owners haven't stumped up for ADS-B-out units yet, but schools have for liability reasons, especially ones in busy airspaces.