Another wonderful flight tracking (coffee break/time-waster) site has emerged courtesy of RadarVirtuel.
A work-in-progress, but the system plots every aircraft in Europe on a Google Map and includes data such as height, flight code, airline and aircraft, destination and start point.
The flight information is obtained by aggregating data from a number of organisations that use ADS-B receivers to monitor aircraft patterns.
The speed in which data and aircraft markers are served onto the map is dependent on bandwidth available at the time. Data can also be filtered by individual airline.
The company says:
We believe that this information can be useful for various needs (locating an airplane for personal or business purposes, computing statistics), and notably it can lead to a better public understanding of what happens above our heads. What we are trying to do is simply display on the web some data that is already available, and make it easy to interpret.
RadarVirtuel is looking for other enthusiasts to get involved with the project in order to increase its coverage around the globe.
Transmitters are picking up flights in the Los Angeles area, Florida, Vancouver region and South Africa.
The Casper system in Holland, unveiled in late-2009, plotted and animated the movements of aircraft arriving and departing from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam as well as other flights in Dutch airspace.