I like commercial airplanes. I like maps.  I like meteorology. What happens when you combine those three elements?  You get three of the most amazing websites for aviation enthusiasts.

Website: flightradar24

Why it’s amazing: Ever wonder how many airplanes are in the skies?  I typically think the answer is alot.  This changed on Friday when the airspace over Chicago was shut down because of a fire in an ATC facility in Aurora, IL.

Even on a boring Sunday morning at 7:30am Eastern/4:30am Pacific, it’s interesting to see the East Coast of the USA lit up by airplanes while the West Coast sleeps.

Website: FlightAware – Live Flight Tracking

Why it’s amazing: Everyone knows you can use Flight Aware to track flights, but they have a feature that is about a year old called the Misery Map which attempts to graphically display delays.  Here is the map from Friday morning. In the standard flight tracking mode, the map includes current weather conditions.  Here is a flight on July 4th that originated in a line of heavy thunderstorms in the mid-Atlantic, and then flew around the outter bands of Hurricane Arthur, before finding calmer weather in the deep south, thru Texas, and then on to SAN.

Website: Great Circle Mapper

Why it’s amazing: Do you ever see travel maps and wonder ‘how did they do that?’  Look no further than the Great Circle Mapper.  It’s simple to use …. just type in the city codes that you visited (in order) with hyphens in between them and then hit the Map It button, and then it uploads a pretty map of where you’ve been.  I input my travels in September 2014 and figured out that I flew 45 segments for 54,481 miles.

Bottom Line:
This is just a quick look at three of my favorite aviation related websites. I would love to know what aviation related website you think is amazing and why you like it!