How to identify a flight based on airport, time and maybe airline?
Today I cycled through Zurich and also came across the airport. I used the chance and made some pictures of aircraft taking off. Since I'm very interested in the type of aircraft as well as the destination, I would like to identify the flights that I have taken pictures of. So how can I identify the type of aircraft and the destination of a flight when I know the airport, the time and sometimes also the airline?
EDIT
Based on the answer I tried to use the airports departure and arrival schedule. However, for example in Zurich, this seems to only work for the actual day, and some days in the future, but not for past flights. Aren't there any other possibilities? Maybe something similar as FlightAware?
EDIT 2
I'm still looking for a canonical answer that is applicable to all airports as well as all kind of flights whether flights of the actual day or from previous days.
Best Answer
FlightAware provides an estimated take-off and landing time. It might be useful as an estimate, but Airliners.net will definitely help with identifying an aircraft type and airline. Destinations will be much more difficult to come by, unless you match up the arrival times with the timetables for a particular airline.
For Zurich: http://flightaware.com/live/airport/LSZH
EDIT
FlightStats provides up to one day of historical arrival/departure information for airports.
FlightStats and FlightAware provide individual flight history for specific dates in the past, so you could also find all of the flights servicing an airport and then figure out what flight it was by comparing actual departure/arrival times.
Pictures about "How to identify a flight based on airport, time and maybe airline?"
How to find out where flight originated?
Just enter the flight number for your journey. Then when you see the map for your flight, on the right side you should see a section that says \u201ctrack inbound plane.\u201d Just click that, and you'll see where the plane is coming from.What means flight on time?
Airline: On-time - The percentage of completed flights that arrived at the gate on-time where on-time is defined as within (less than) 15 minutes of scheduled gate arrival time. Delayed - The percentage of completed flights that arrived at the gate 15 minutes or more after the scheduled arrival time.Does FlightAware track all flights?
FlightAware fuses position data from Aireon's space-based ADS-B network with flight information to provide 100% truly global flight tracking with position updates at least once every minute.Airline delayes explained - Slot times
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Answer 2
(I'll add my own answer to my question since I found a very cool tool that works at least for Zurich airport.)
For Zurich airport there is an online real-time flight tracker available on this website. It is a really awesome tool that shows you all the planes that have a transponder (~80%) and that are within the limits of two antennas placed on hills around Zurich.
Using this tool is should be easily possible to identify such flights in real-time. I'm not yet sure if it provides also some historic data.
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Images: Josh Sorenson, JESHOOTS.com, LT Chan, Gustavo Fring