Flights over Ireland

mickger

Was checking the sky this morning on a clear day and couldn't help but notice all the jets in the sky mainly going from east to west. I'm in Waterford city and we get alot of traffic over us but since November started it seems to be more frequent. Would all these flights be going to the states? Its just a shame there is no way to track these flights and know where there going

kraggy

mickger wrote: »

Was checking the sky this morning on a clear day and couldn't help but notice all the jets in the sky mainly going from east to west. I'm in Waterford city and we get alot of traffic over us but since November started it seems to be more frequent. Would all these flights be going to the states? Its just a shame there is no way to track these flights and know where there going

The traffic overhead depends on the North Atlantic Tracks.

The designated routes change daily according to the location of the jet streams (which blow from west to east).

The NAT's try to avoid them westbound because of the headwind, and take advantage of them eastbound because of the tailwind.

The tracks are overhead Waterford today but could be much farther south or north tomorrow when you may not see a single trans-Atlantic flight overhead.

mickger

kraggy wrote: »

The traffic overhead depends on the North Atlantic Tracks.

The designated routes change daily according to the location of the jet streams (which blow from west to east).

The NAT's try to avoid them westbound because of the headwind, and take advantage of them eastbound because of the tailwind.

The tracks are overhead Waterford today but could be much farther south or north tomorrow when you may not see a single trans-Atlantic flight overhead.

I never knew that it changed from day to day. Thanks for a very informative answer.

kraggy

No problem!

They may be different tomorrow or may not. Depends. But they can and do change.

highlydebased

Routings of current NATS can be found here https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/qryhtml/nat.html

ch252

kraggy wrote: »

The traffic overhead depends on the North Atlantic Tracks.

The designated routes change daily according to the location of the jet streams (which blow from west to east).

The NAT's try to avoid them westbound because of the headwind, and take advantage of them eastbound because of the tailwind.

The tracks are overhead Waterford today but could be much farther south or north tomorrow when you may not see a single trans-Atlantic flight overhead.

Damn! you got to this thread before me I see!lol why not tune shannon ctr?? Ill look into the frequencies for you, I only know one or two, but they arent for waterford airspace! 119.075 is one anyway. Ill get you one for over waterford and post it.

Regards,

Darragh.

highlydebased

119.075 is the low level freq along with 124.700

High level you want 132.150, 131.150, 134.725, 134.625 etc 135.600

Steyr

mickger wrote: »

Its just a shame there is no way to track these flights and know where there going

There is a limited way: www.liveatc.net

Krusty

This website is pretty good for tracking flights... but they only show them as far as around half way across the Atlantic from the U.S.

http://flightaware.com

If you REALLY want to track flights that you can see overhead, you can buy a piece of kit that receives aircraft transponder information, translates it, and pipes it out to a bit of software on your pc/laptop.

Depending on what hardware the aircraft actually has (Mode S, etc) it shows a little icon of the aircraft on a map of Ireland/Europe/whatever indicating current position, altitude, speed, carrier, track etc etc.

Really nerdy, but pretty sweet if you're into that kind of thing.
Handy if you look up at a contrail and say to yourself ' I wonder who and what that is?'.

highlydebased

I used to run the Shannon feed on liveatc.net . Imight start it up again someday

www.flytecomm.com is also a good, albeit less descriptive site.