Message posted by lone wolf on May 10, 2006 at 21:08:17 PST:

The conventional thinking is the flights dissapear once the planes are handed over to Groom Lake approach. Nellis control handels both commercial and military traffic around the range. I'm not sure if anyone ever bothered to record Nellis control during Red Flag, but you hear the controller advising the civilian aircraft that there are fighter aircrafts at all altitudes (or something to that effect).

The tracking websites are a relatively new in the scheme of things. I'm sure when the system was designed, there wasn't much thought about planes that would be both civilian and military. The Janet tracking is some sort of compromise (I assume).

Note that there are two types of tracking. One is the official FAA feed, and the other is passur, which uses a passive tracking scheme combined with minimal FAA data such as flight plans, registration numbers, etc. Passur predates the FAA feed. Often passur will show a plane that is blocked. It won't show the registration number, but rather a fake flight number. It will ID the type of aircraft correctly. To the best of my knowledge, the FAA feed doesn't show blocked flights. I figured this out comparing passur on LAS (when it still worked) and flightaware.

In Reply to: Re: KTKM? posted by Will(NorCal) on May 10, 2006 at 19:45:04 PST:

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