Openflights vs MyFlightRadar24

2infinity

2infinity

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Well I read in today's AFF Gazette that FlightTracker is ceasing from the end of this month. I'm a little disappointed because I like that feature, but progress is progress right? and besides, it's outside my sphere of control, so I must just learn to live with it.

The good news is there are 2 options suggested 1) Openflights and 2) MyFlightRadar24. There are probably many other sites you can use, but I'm not going to go looking for them. I did however have a look at both Openflights and MyFlightRadar24.

Openflights is well just Flight Tracker. I'm guessing AFF just incorporated the programming into their website. So anyone choosing this as a replacement will be quite comfortable as you will be used to how it works. Nothing more needs to be said.

MyFlightRadar24, I'd never heard of. I was aware of FlightRadar24 where you can look at flights in real time. Seems they are the same developers, with MrFlightRadar24 being your individual profile. MyFlightRadar24 is colourful and just looks better and modern. My initial thoughts was, yep, I'll use this, but when I tried to import my Flight Tracker CSV file, less than half came across. So I tried importing into Openflights, also problems. Sigh.

I played around with my CSV file a bit to make it more transferrable and this time all my records imported into MyFlightRadar24. I still needed to spend about 2 hours cleaning my data (202 records). MyFlightRadar24 didn't recognise any of my QF flights so each individual record needed to be looked at, and if you like to know the type of plane you were on, you may need to clean this up on an individual record basis as well. A lot of my Boeing 737 flights showed up as Boeing 73X from import, so needed to change all them to Boeing 737-800 (B738). MyFlightRadar24 didn't recognise 747 planes from the import either and I lost all the departure and arrival times.

So, its all cleaned now except for departure and arrival times. That would just be too much effort.

I'm guessing our AFF profiles will no longer show a link to our 'replacement' Flight Tracker. oh well.
 
I was wondering about this myself a few days ago. I have happily used AFF Flight Tracker since it was launched, and have 500+ flights listed on there.

I tried importing the CSV file onto both MyFlightradar24 and Open Flights, and had pretty much the same issues that you did. In the end I decided that I'll just use MyFlightradar24, although I did have the issue of departure/arrival times not being listed; some airlines and aircraft types were also missing (including Qantas). I decided that I did want to keep that data, so I manually updated all of my flights. I would estimate it took around 1 hour per 100 flights to do this.

I do like the stats and general look & feel of MyFlightradar24, and in some respects it works better than OpenFlights. (For example, OpenFlights would often struggle with daylight savings and show the flight time from SYD-BNE as 30 minutes in the summer.) I do wish you could click on an airport in the colourful map and get more info and/or just have your flights to/from that airport showing. I have quite a lot going on in my map and it looks rather cluttered in places.

If anyone uses a different software to track their flights, I would be interested to hear your thoughts.
 
After getting the same problems importing into MyFlightradar24, I updated the info from TripIt and, while there were still some issues that needed to be corrected, it produced much better results.
 
I jumped over to MyFR24 earlier in the year (when travel was still a thing...) and also ended up doing most of it manually. For ~150 records, wasn't too hard.
 
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Mattg said:
If anyone uses a different software to track their flights, I would be interested to hear your thoughts.
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I used and liked www.jetitup.net. However, it seems to be a one man show and not sure how maintained it is this days. The UI was done really well. Importing from TripIt made life a breeze.

About a year ago the guy obviously let his domain name lapse by mistake. It was originally jetitup.com. I don't think he ever got it back. Now it seems his SSL certificate has expired, which is what leads me to question whether it's being maintained.

Last year when the issues started I did look around and concluded I still preferred the UI of jetitup. Moving forward, I might need to move but nothing has grabbed me yet.
 
exceladdict said:
Yep that might be easier done by data manipulation in a spreadsheet. God speed!
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My original logs were in a Symphony Spreadsheet.

I was planning a decent tidy up anyhow as I have many descriptions of the same type of equipment including about 7 versions of 73H type aircraft.
 
2infinity said:
Openflights is well just Flight Tracker. I'm guessing AFF just incorporated the programming into their website. So anyone choosing this as a replacement will be quite comfortable as you will be used to how it works. Nothing more needs to be said.
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Flight Tracker was indeed a version of Open Flights, but a very old version. Development actually stalled for a long period, and then by the time it started again the changes were so large that the AFF version couldn't be updated to take into account the improvements. Since then, the gulf has widened and now AFF is at the stage where it can't maintain the very old version it once had ported.

With regards to the FR24 option, this was previously called "flight diary" (dot net) and FR24 obviously saw the market to track their users flights, so they bought them and incorporated them into their suite. I quite like the FR24 option and have been using it for a while now, it's particularly useful (not this year) as you can pre-add your flights and when they have been flown the site will add the flight registrations from their records post flight.

my.flightradar24.com

samh004 | myFlightradar24

Your personal flight logbook
my.flightradar24.com
 
samh004 said:
I quite like the FR24 option and have been using it for a while now, it's particularly useful (not this year) as you can pre-add your flights and when they have been flown the site will add the flight registrations from their records post flight.
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That's a handy feature. I like that!
 
Mattg said:
That's a handy feature. I like that!
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Helps to have FR24 holding your flight data as they also track all the flights.

Only dislike is the extra clicks after each flight addition asking to rate various planes, airlines, airports etc... but I guess that's the trade off as you're getting a free service from them.

As @Doug_Westcott mentioned, I believe their TripIt integration is good too.
 
myFR24 is a superior tool, but the import and sync capability is rubbish. Took me endless amounts of cleansing and retries to get it to import my openflights export. And the tripit sync doesn't seem to work.
 
Very sad to see this feature go, as it was one of my drivers to be on this site. I was a frequent user looking at "leg timings" etc, helping with the long nights in hotel rooms, but like everything in these crazy times, we reaccess what we need. Sadly, will have to look hard at this year's membership payment now.
 
Very much liked this feature and in particular the importing from TripIt, so will be shame to lose it. Time to go looking at alternatives!

That said, its a great time to be doing this as its unlikely much data will be added in the next few months, and I spend most of time working with spreadsheets so its not a problem to do data conversions! I'll update this thread if I come across any other solutions or methods that might help.
 
I just tried to import my 509 flights to MFR24 and it only imported 198 of them. I've sent them an email asking if there's a way to improve that success rate but I'm not holding my breath.
 
just tried to import my downloaded CSV file from FlightTracker into myFR and it said it was complete, but nothing is showing up on the frontend.
 
AisleSeat said:
just tried to import my downloaded CSV file from FlightTracker into myFR and it said it was complete, but nothing is showing up on the frontend.
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Scratch that, I downloaded a second time, reuploaded and most are in there. I've spotted a SYD-NAN return flight, but its counted it as one flight
 

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