What’s New

OK, so far we have been discussing how power travelers harness the power of the Web to make their trips easier. Now we will take a look at how to make your next airline flight more comfortable.

One of our favorite Web sites is Seat Guru at www.seatguru.com. Visitors to this site select their airline, aircraft, and then a seating diagram comes up. The diagrams have details about which are good seats, poor seats, and which to be aware of. It is very neat!

Unlike the airline seating diagrams, those at Seat Guru are reviewed by real travelers. You will not find a warning on an airline diagram that says a particular seat may be cold because it is near an emergency exit or that the seats don’t fully recline because it is against a bulkhead. But at Seat Guru you will find all that and more.

Particularly useful are the details about the seats themselves. You can discover how wide they are and what the pitch is in the class you intend to fly. If you need extra leg room you may find that 31 inch pitch is not enough. The ability to avoid 17 inch wide “mini-seats” is especially helpful.

Seat Guru is definitely a site you will want to visit before you book your next trip.

Well, so far we have discovered a couple of ways to track flights and use the Web to obtain important information. That is pretty standard stuff. But there is at least one other way that the power traveler can harness the Web to his or her advantage.

I encourage anybody who is interested in travel, airlines, airplanes, or local news to visit the site for Live ATC at www.liveatc.net. ATC stands for Air Traffic Control and through a network of volunteers it is possible to listen to radio traffic between the ground and aircraft in the US and beyond. Depending on the airport, it is possible to select from approach and departure controls, or ground control.

Do you even wonder what is happening when your airplane in the line for take off? Have you ever heard your pilot say that they weren’t sure when they’d be allowed to proceed to the runway? By visiting LiveATC.net you can often find out what is going on. A few months ago I knew somebody who was delayed at Newark while the aircraft waited for clearance to take to the runway. I “tuned into” the Newark tower and heard when that flight was cleared.

LiveATC.net is definitely one of the most interesting travel oriented Web sites. Check it out before your travel the next time.

For travelers one of the best things about the Web is the ability to use online services to make a trip easier. There are a number of tools that are useful for both travelers and the people who are associated with them, such as friends, family, and co-workers. Among my favorite sites is Flight Aware at http://flightaware.com.

Flight Aware is not only handy, but it is fun, too. It is loaded with flight and airport information. From the home page you can track the flight of your choice by entering the airline and flight number. There is even an option for tracking a flight even if you don’t know it’s number.

You can also track a specific aircraft by entering the tail number. Some people have favorite (or least favorite) airplanes, and it can be interesting to see where the aircraft is now. A few months ago I flew between Seattle and JFK on a Boeing 757. Three or four months later it turns out that I was on the very same airplane from Chicago to Seattle. I wonder where that 757 is now?

Flight Aware is also very handy for checking traffic at the airport of your choice. Enter your airport’s code, such as ALB for Albany or SEA for Seattle, and a list of incoming and outgoing flights appears. Included are both scheduled and current flight status. A high level of detail is available including the type of aircraft, flight status, and maps that show the location of flights in the vicinity of the airport.

Some while back I noticed that at about 10:04 every evening an airplane flew over our house. It was a regular as clockwork. But I couldn’t see what company was flying the jet. A check of Flight Aware showed that the flight was a cargo flight carrying the overnight deliveries from ALB to an airport in the midwest. Now that is a handy Web site!

Are you a “power traveler?” Power travelers are those people who seem to spend more time in airports and on airplanes than in the office. You know who they are, you have seen them with their notebook computers smoking away and they search for wireless connection. Even if you are not a power traveler you can harness the Web and use it to your advantage.

One of my favorite tricks is to use the automated notification services that most airlines and many travel sites offer. For instance, if you register with Orbitz they will call you or send an email message about three hours prior to departure. The message will tell you the status of your flight, including the departure and arrival gates if that information is available. Recently I traveled from Albany to Los Angeles via Cincinnati. When I turned my cell phone back on after landing in Cincinnati, Orbitz had already left a voice mail message telling me about my next flight and what gate I had to get to.

Most airlines offer these same type of notification services if you register with them. Check your carrier before your next trip.

I recently overheard a rather extensive telephone conversation in the Philadelphia airport. Our flight had a delay, and the speaker was trying to explain how the person on the other end of the call should check the flight’s status. She told that person to go into her email box, find the message from the airline, click such-and-such link, and so on.

It is really much simpler than that. If you go to the home page of your favorite airline you will almost always find a link labeled “Flight Status” or something similar. Click that link and enter the flight number. Many airlines have flight search tools that are handy if you do not have the flight number.

There are also a number of very handy third-party online flight tools. In the next issue we will discuss some of them. Stay tuned…