Hi,
I've been getting on Flightaware.com recently, just for fun to track real airline flights from the continental USA along routes to Europe and vice-versa. I have a pretty good grasp of the concept of the NAT OTS, along with FSBuild's ability to download and import the daily tracks into a flight plan. I also understand that several airline routes between the USA and Europe are 'random tracks', or flightplan waypoints generated outside of the NAT system for better optimization of pariticular flight routes.
My question is more about the general nature of Oceanic routing over the North Atlantic and how random tracks can be routed along side the NAT ones. Playing around on Flightaware.com, I've noticed that several airline flights with flightplans along a random track seem to intersect with the daily plotted NAT system ones.
Here is an example flight plan taken off of Flightware, a United 747 enroute KSFO to EGLL:
KSFO SFO8 SFO SAC J32 FMG J32 LLC DBS BIL MOT YWG YRL CHARN SCAL KLIPS MOATT 58/50 58/40 57/30 56/20 ETARI UP731 ODLUM UM17 DEXET UP979 DEVOL UN546 STU UP2 NUMPO Y3 NIGIT OCK1F EGLL
Here is this route build in FSBuild:
Also, notice in the above that I have downloaded and displayed the daily NAT tracks for the same time period as the real-world active flightplan entered into FSBUILD. It seems that the random oceanic track route being flown by this United 747 intersects into the daily NAT Track system.
I've noticed several instances of these seemingly conflicting examples of random track vs. NAT system interaction, and I'm wondering if real-world airline flights can routinely get clearances like this with random track routing that intersects into daily NAT airspace, or is this just a fluke with something I'm doing on my end? I'm positive that FSBuild is importing the very latest NAT track information because I double checked the date and time from the FAA source website.
Would be really interesting to gain a clearer picture of how this all works!
Thank you for anysight you can provide! For the record, FSBUILD rocks!!!!!
_________________ Ruger
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