Post by Deleted on Jan 15, 2020 15:31:57 GMT 1
I have noticed that people often comment on the inaccuracies of FR24.
Allow me to tell a few tales of my first-hand experience. I spent one summer a few years ago working in ops at Swissport in Luton. We had FR24 running all the time on a large screen in the office, because it helps with allocating the ground handling staff to the inbound aircraft. One day I was watching the screen for a particular Wizzair flight, because I needed to collect some important documents from the captain. I went out to meet the aircraft, only to discover that the aircraft was not the one showing on FR24. I mentioned this to the captain (who as it happened was British), and who was as surprised as me. He said that since being allocated the transponder code on leaving Bucharest, they had not been asked to change it. When I returned to the office I checked the SITA message and sure enough, it had the same registration as the FR24 signal. This happened a number of times over the summer, especially with Wizzair for some reason, but the classic example came when FR24 was showing that an An-26 was operating on the MNG cargo service from Istanbul. They even had the correct registration, UR-ELD, which confused us all! We checked the SITA signal, and from the registration it was Turkish and one of the A300s. One of the guys said he could never remember them using the Antonov on that flight. It was a busy evening and I was distracted by other things, but on my way home that night I passed the cargo area and there, in all its glory was an MNG A300 with the registration which was on the SITA message!
Now I have not the foggiest clue how this system works - who inputs the data and whether it can be changed at some point, but it seems to me that it can be very unreliable. We did report the inaccuracies to ATC, but heard no more about it.
Allow me to tell a few tales of my first-hand experience. I spent one summer a few years ago working in ops at Swissport in Luton. We had FR24 running all the time on a large screen in the office, because it helps with allocating the ground handling staff to the inbound aircraft. One day I was watching the screen for a particular Wizzair flight, because I needed to collect some important documents from the captain. I went out to meet the aircraft, only to discover that the aircraft was not the one showing on FR24. I mentioned this to the captain (who as it happened was British), and who was as surprised as me. He said that since being allocated the transponder code on leaving Bucharest, they had not been asked to change it. When I returned to the office I checked the SITA message and sure enough, it had the same registration as the FR24 signal. This happened a number of times over the summer, especially with Wizzair for some reason, but the classic example came when FR24 was showing that an An-26 was operating on the MNG cargo service from Istanbul. They even had the correct registration, UR-ELD, which confused us all! We checked the SITA signal, and from the registration it was Turkish and one of the A300s. One of the guys said he could never remember them using the Antonov on that flight. It was a busy evening and I was distracted by other things, but on my way home that night I passed the cargo area and there, in all its glory was an MNG A300 with the registration which was on the SITA message!
Now I have not the foggiest clue how this system works - who inputs the data and whether it can be changed at some point, but it seems to me that it can be very unreliable. We did report the inaccuracies to ATC, but heard no more about it.