We all know when you go on a flight in a commercial plane, be it Ryan Air, Easy Jet or Jet2 you will be asked to (and should) put you phone into flight mode.   This will cut off your internet / Data connection and limit your phones functionality.  However you can still leave the location setting turned on and if you get bored you can follow the flight path on your phone using Google Maps, Bing Maps or similar.

It can be a bit of fun to have a look out the window and match up where you are flying above by looking at the map and seeing your real time location.

I did notice that it did take longer for the location to be found everytime I switched to the map app, which might me due to the speed of the plane or something else, because in reality being higher up means you are closer to the GPS (satellites) and would expect better/faster location updates.

Well I have done this recently and tracked the flight path on my device now and again.  However as a result of doing this I did find something a bit strange with the flight path.  The plane took off from Manchester airport and heading towards Morocco.  Bearing that in mind I was expecting the plane to start immediately heading southwards, flying over UK, then France, Spain the Morocco.  However instead I was a bit intrigued as to the path it actually took..

After take off the plane started heading West and then North West… then after a while as I looked out the windows I noticed the west cosast of UK on my right, which is strange as that means we were heading away from Morocco, how does that work.

A bit longer and looking out the window again I noticed something even more strange.  I was pretty sure it was Blackpool Tower and two of its long piers.  I was not sure but now after comparing it to Google Maps it definitely was Blackpool Tower….

So we just flew North West from Manchester Airport to Blackpool, but thats going in the wrong direction completely regardless of whether you take into consideration the curvature of the spherical Earth.

So I was confused as to where we were being taken… where are we going?

But then the plane started doing a slow turn to the left and I found myself looking at the south coast of the Isle of Man… How does that make sense… Well I am glad it started turning atleast…

From there it then started heading more south towards the actual destination… I ended up seeing coastline of Ireland as we flew past it.

We did arrive at the destination and in good time, however the flight at the start seemed unnecessary.

Looking at the map again the only thing I could think of as to why this path was taken is to avoid flying over as much land as possible… as taking this path meant avoiding flying over the UK, France and Spain.  it flew mostly over the sea…. so maybe that was the intended reason.

Flight Simulators

Well if you back home and miss the plane flight why not try a little flying yourself. I found this great flight simulator style game you can play right in your browser with no download needed. You get a choice of planes including a commercial Boing plane and you can fly them. You can overlay a real map on the screen to see where you are going and also plan your flight. It is tricky at first because you will need to master and learn the keyboard bindings for the controls, but once in the air you can turn on autopilot to make things easier. Cool right? Fly from your local airport to your favourite destinations. Heres the link.