12 December 2008

Planespotting - WebTrak takes off

| Gungahlin Al
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As advised in a story about the Airport Master Plan being rejected (post #20), Air Services Australia was to launch a new service Webtrak.

This service has now gone live at http://www.airservicesaustralia.com/webtrak

WebTrak allows you (after a delay of 20-40 minutes) see the exact flightpath a plane took in or out of the airport, designate your home (or other location) and see the distance and altitude from you, see the noise readings at the Jerra and new Hackett noise monitoring stations as the flight passes, and more.

No military or VIP flights will show, but everything else will be in there for your planespotting pleasure.

The noise monitoring stations are greyed out for me, and I’ve sent a query to the Airport about why this might be.

As a media release from Mike Kelly mentioned, the information on the website is sourced from the air traffic control radars displaying movements within 55 kilometres of the airport and up to a height of 3,000 metres.

And to reiterate my previous link, if you are interested in aggregate flightpaths of arrivals and departures, see the quarterly ASA report and particularly pages 16and 22.

[ED – interestingly the system will also let them pinpoint troublemakers and route around them…]

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Anyone who has flown in to Sydney (or Melbourne, or any bloody where) should realise that anywhere is a “flight path”. The line Snow’s running, that there is one flight path (over Tralee) is a giant, whopping LIE.

This is very true. However, if an area is left free from housing, at least they can attempt to concentrate flights there when wind direction etc allow.

ant said :

i’m not sure that this thing is showing all flights.

Some programmer’s left off some semicolon somewhere, no doubt ….

; )

Anyone who has flown in to Sydney (or Melbourne, or any bloody where) should realise that anywhere is a “flight path”. The line Snow’s running, that there is one flight path (over Tralee) is a giant, whopping LIE.

I support a curfew. I do not want either Tralee-bypass noise or 24/7 freight and don’t want this foisted on our lovely peaceful town.

so why not bring in a curfew then – problem solved.

I can’t imagine Canberra ever becoming the freight hub Snow would like us to believe anyway – unless bulk freight links from Canberra are significantly improved.

ps – you may be late to the party, but if Canb Airport get their way, the entire city will be a gigantic flightpath.

All night long.

This is it baby!

Have they got a noise meter to register the amount of whining from people who chose to live near/under a flight path?

i’m not sure that this thing is showing all flights. I was having a poke around it last night, and interrogated the 4 – 5pm slow, which is rush hour over my range. Nothing. Bit puzzled by that. also, usually 5pm – 6pm you get a line of them coming in from the jerra hill to land, you can see the lights, and there was nothing.

The noise monitor on this webtrak site is working today.

Check out yesterday between 5.12 and 5.26 – you get 3 or 4 really noisy planes – up to 71 on the noise dot.

Just untick ‘current flights’ choose 5.12 yesterday as the time to replay, and set the replay speed to a bit faster so it doesn’t take too long.

This webtrak thingy is great!

Also the noise/disturbance seems to change a lot depending on weather conditions etc.

So checking the Tralee airspace on one day won’t show the whole picture.

Some nights we get heaps of planes – eg last night between 7 and 9 was really noisy, but other nights we hardly notice.

I’m not sure if it is planes going closer to us due to cloud cover, or just different wind conditions making them seem closer.

bluey39 said :

Its very interesting doing comparisons between Sydney and Canberra. Looks to me like idiot Byron has just proved how much of a liar he really is!!! Also don’t seem to see heaps of airtraffic over Tralee.

Well then, that means no one at Tralee will be whinging when the traffic does increase over the next 20 years then……….knob!

Has anyone got the noise monitoring part of this to work yet?

Very loud plane over our place yesterday at 7 .15 or so – this shows it going right overhead too, but I can’t measure the noise.

Its very interesting doing comparisons between Sydney and Canberra. Looks to me like idiot Byron has just proved how much of a liar he really is!!! Also don’t seem to see heaps of airtraffic over Tralee.

> Geez – check out 11/12 9.06am – just a bit congested with the little ones…

Touch and goes, certainly. RAAF possibly. Are there any RAAF planes stationed there that pilots would be training in? (I’m from Sydney and don’t know what’s at Fairbairn, or even if it’s still active.)

Interesting though that they were using the NW-SE runway while commercial were using the S-N. Would have made for some interesting timing on the ground and also careful timing where the loops crossed approaches and departues at probably about the same altitude.

Gungahlin Al6:46 pm 12 Dec 08

Geez – check out 11/12 9.06am – just a bit congested with the little ones…

Gungahlin Al6:34 pm 12 Dec 08

Had a reply from Noel at the airport – the noise monitor presently has a 24 hour delay. So you can watch that for yesterday’s flights not today’s.
ASA may have told us that at the meeting, but clearly I missed it if they did. (note to self: learn to type faster on PDA)

Plane Watch!

Don’t like the inbuilt lag time? Get yourself one of these! 🙂

harvyk1 said :

It’ll be interesting, ASA and CBR Airport claim that the flight paths are sent down the high noice corridor which was created sometime after 1995 to stop aircraft flying over houses.

It’ll be interesting to see how closely they fly within this corridor.

I saw a virgin blue flight over Curtin a few weeks back. I found it’s track on Saturday 29/11 at 11:00… Looks like he came in over the Federal Highway, then had to loop around to the south, flying over much of Woden. I wonder if he was lost or sight-seeing?

I’m positive I saw another VB flight travel over Curtin in south-west direction, but that could be my memory playing tricks with me.

Gungahlin Al11:34 am 12 Dec 08

Ant: seems neither noise monitor is reporting yet.

I am getting some blocks reporting map sections missing even though they aren’t.

The underlying imagery, which uses MS Virtual Earth, is VERY old a number of years.

Remember there is a delay built in for security reasons.

If you plug in your house location you can click on a passing plane to see its altitude and distance. Remember altitude is above sea level – the runway is at about 600m, so subtract at least that off the height above measurement – more if you know the actual altitude of your home (consult your GPS).

Holden Caulfield11:05 am 12 Dec 08

Air Services Australia, surely, must take the dubious distinction of having the worst logo known to man?

Yes P1, me too. I had a fiddle with it last night, and if you unticked current flights, you got one grey circle noise monitoring spot (which turned out to be jerra). So not sure how that all works. I suspect I’m not seeing everything though. For instance, this evening there’ll be a line of planes coming in to land (and taking off again to the north), so it’ll be interesting to interrogate that time and see if they’re all there.

It shows my area, so again, between 4pm and 5pm is our scheduled time to get lines of them coming over to make the turn, so can check the tracker vs what actually happened.

the map is weird, vast bits of it are just missing.

Gungahlin Al10:33 am 12 Dec 08

Ah thank you P1 that’s sorted it. So you can watch noise levels in replay mode only.
And it doesn’t look like the Hackett monitor is in place yet, even though it is showing on the map.

It seems that if I uncheck the “show current flights” box, then I can see the noise monitoring grey circles. If I show the little planes, then the circles disappear.

Well since this has turned totally flight sim nerd, fsx, PMDG 747 and Wilco 737 Pilot in command is what I run. I’ve tried a few of the Australia pack add-ons, but they’ve caused more problems than their worth (Let’s face it, you don’t see much at 37,000 ft, and having the game bomb out when your doing a longer flight eg Syd to Per it can get very annoyink)

Yeah avsim.com and flightsim.com have plenty of free downloads. Worth getting. I bought the game for about $30 recently at JB-Hifi. You can also download AI arcraft from World-of-AI.com that have real life depatures and flight paths. If you are into aviation, its worth getting. The latest Flight Sim (FSX) is a big CPU hungry, so I would recommend getting FS2004.

it’s fsx for me.

Bah, the ATC in FSX is hopeless, I’ve lost count of the number of times it has told me to land a 747 behind a cessena on the same runway.

It’ll be interesting, ASA and CBR Airport claim that the flight paths are sent down the high noice corridor which was created sometime after 1995 to stop aircraft flying over houses.

It’ll be interesting to see how closely they fly within this corridor.

Oooh… that interests me. I must get me a copy. Was it difficult to obtain the updated airport? Last time I played MS Flight sim was ’98 so I’m not quite up to date with how all that happens. Suppose I could just google it… 😉

MS Flight Sim 2004. I have an updated Canberra Airport scenery installed and all the airlines as well as the VIP aircraft that visit the airport. It has become a recent obsession.

Hey, that’s pretty neat.

H1NGO – you use Flight Simulator? What version?

Yay! Now I can compare it with my flight sim paths!

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