Updating FPLs and RPLs - Irish / Scottish FIRs

JSJ

Hi all,

I'm just thinking about the great Irish FIR (and Scottish) that @Harlequin produced.

If I wanted to give an update to the repetitive flight plans and any others within the FIR, how would one go about getting the data?

Assuming there's no restrictions on doing this, is it a case of just looking at, say, Dublin or other airport arrivals / departures online, as well as Flight Radar 24, or are there any other hints and tips to do this?

What about other aircraft, other than the airlines - how does one get those plans?

Cheers,
Joe

Harlequin

Joe,

I've always used Flightaware to obtain flight information when building flight plans. Flightaware

Creating an account is free. You'll need to go into the Display options in 'My Account' and change the time format to 24 hour time and check the 'always list 4 letter code' box.

Once that's done, you will then go to 'Flight Tracking' then 'browse by airport.' There you enter the airport's ICAO or IATA's code - EIDW or DUB in Dublin's case - and you're presented with the information. I've used the lower scheduled traffic windows to get the scheduled information. The upper two windows show live and recent flights where you'll find any GA/Business jet flights to and from the airport.

Knowing how to use a spreadsheet is essential to the process - it's very laborious without it.

Finally, to find the alpha-numeric callsigns for the flights you'll need to head over to Flightradar24 to look up the flights where the flight number and the alpha-numeric callsigns are paired. That's not a quick process either.

Good luck,
H

JSJ

Cheers Harlequin!

And another pertinent question - how would you recommend going about finding those flights that went via the Shannon FIR as overflights but not land at one of its airports?

Harlequin

Same principle. Only this time you look up the schedules for oceanic aircraft arriving and departing from European airports. So for Frankfurt, say, you would grab all the flights to and from the US, Canada, Central America, the Caribbean and some South American airports to Frankfurt. Then it's just a case of ‘wash, rinse and repeat’ for a bunch of other European airports - as many as you feel like adding.

I didn't say it was easy … 🙂

JSJ

Harlequin Ha! Well, I like a challenge. I'll see how the process is and may give it a go.

Thanks for the help!