GEEKS R US.

So Geeks R Us strikes again! The following are two amazing websites http://www.flightradar24.com/ and http://uk.flightaware.com/ oh it’s ok you can click them, you’ll either love them straight away, in which case you may already know about them or know immediately that you are not going to ever like them or anything like them and that you are not going to be bitten by any geek bug!!

Today and ongoing I had every need and justification to be a total geek. My son and his girlfriend are travelling by plane for 12½ hours, non stop London Heathrow to Singapore with Singapore Airlines. Not only that they are on the world’s largest commercial aircraft the A380 and I can follow them every inch of the way. So I therefore become even more of a geek than usual because I have someone on one of those little animated planes.
Using live departure and arrival boards, the airline sites and simply just the flight number in to Google and these two sites you are your own flight manager, it really is amazing. Try it! 
Start with a major airport in the UK or Europe and just click around on a few flight numbers and allow yourself to ask some questions, what aircraft, where is it going and press some buttons!! You've lost nothing except a couple of minutes and hey you might even appreciate exactly why I find them so amazingly fascinating!!

On a different level altogether though there are in fact some hidden goodies with sites such as this. Seeing the amount of aircraft flying at any one time would surely make anybody who was nervous of flying reassured that if it was that unsafe you would hear of fatal accidents every single hour of every single day. Leading credence to the fact that you have more chance of being kicked to death by a donkey on the beach of your destination than dying in a plane crash on the way there.

Looking at these sites it is obvious that if you were to follow any one of these little animated aircraft  for its whole journey or even just part of it you would inevitably learn a little bit or maybe even a lot about the geography of this wonderful globe of ours. Use them in the landscape mode and its not that different to Google earth with emphasis of course on the busiest airports of the world!

Oh and I haven’t even told you about the ‘cockpit view’ but if you are a geek like me you will find those out, almost as a matter of course!

Ok got to go my son’s flight is just 2½ hours from landing in Singapore and I need to look through the window and ponder as to why it is running 17 minutes late!!