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someone explain this flight path to me

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Old Aug 31, 2012 | 10:49 am
  #1  
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someone explain this flight path to me



http://flightaware.com/live/flight/UAL5277

Is this a bad day to be flying STL to IAH?
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Old Aug 31, 2012 | 1:58 pm
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Originally Posted by arisaa
Is this a bad day to be flying STL to IAH?
If you read the papers and/or watch the news once in a while, you may have heard about Isaac - if not you may notice a really large system around STL on the image; that's Isaac. Maybe, just maybe, that had something to do with it.
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Old Aug 31, 2012 | 2:05 pm
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Originally Posted by Zouf
If you read the papers and/or watch the news once in a while, you may have heard about Isaac - if not you may notice a really large system around STL on the image; that's Isaac. Maybe, just maybe, that had something to do with it.
Did you click on the link and look at the flight path? If correct (which I doubt), it is pretty bizarre.
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Old Aug 31, 2012 | 2:10 pm
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Originally Posted by Bonehead
Did you click on the link and look at the flight path? If correct (which I doubt), it is pretty bizarre.
appears as the aircraft started approach, the weather done bad and the aircraft was sent on a new path to delay landing and change runways. Not really very bizarre. Sometime planes will do circling patterns and other delaying techniques.

Does appear there may be spurious segment in the data, which is not unusually.
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Old Aug 31, 2012 | 9:54 pm
  #5  
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A short while after taking off from St. Louis, the aircraft almost doubled back on itself then resumed in the general direction. I had never seen that before which is why I asked. And yes I knew about Isaac as I was on the next flight out of STL to IAH, which incidentally was quite smooth thanks to the excellent flight planning/navigation of the pilots
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Old Aug 31, 2012 | 10:10 pm
  #6  
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That back and forth just south of STL might be a FlightAware data error, I've seen that on FA before. If the aircraft actually did that, I would expect the flight time to be a lot longer than 1:52 which seems to be about average for an STL-IAH flight.
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Old Sep 1, 2012 | 12:31 am
  #7  
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Two possible explanations:

A - the aircraft changes heading from 229 to 203 to 23 to 360 and speeds from 209 to 216 to 409 to 216mph all in less than a minute, requiring F16-like 9g acceleration, turning, and decelerating, exceeding all design parameters for a passenger plane

B - Data error

I'm going to go with B
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Old Sep 1, 2012 | 12:37 am
  #8  
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Originally Posted by WineCountryUA
appears as the aircraft started approach, the weather done bad and the aircraft was sent on a new path to delay landing and change runways. Not really very bizarre. Sometime planes will do circling patterns and other delaying techniques.
Except STL was the departure airport.

Better link than yesterday's:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/U...506Z/KSTL/KIAH

Regardless, it might have been a data glitch.
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