Things that go whiz, zoom, bang, and bleep have always been my passion, especially those things that
are impressive feats of engineering and science. Although I’m just a beginning airhead (is that the right term?), airplanes have recently really sprung my spring and I’ve wiled away quite a few hours reading up on various airplanes, airlines, etc. My recent trips on planes have renewed my interest in this field, the terminology, and how it all works to provide the world with an amazing system of transportation.
There are a lot of great sites out there that appeal to the airplane enthusiast, from the detailed walkings of Wikipedia and their wide range of airplane descriptions to SeatGuru, for those that want to find the best ride, to travel places like Kayak that compare hundreds of airlines for nice prices, and my newest favorite place — FlightAware.
This awesome website tracks all flights over US airspace at all times, 24/7/365. You can look at air traffic over particular airports, you can track particular flight numbers, track all of a particular type of plane, and you can even enter the tail number of a particular aircraft that you want to watch and it’ll plot it out. It shows maps of the airports, maps of current flights both inbound/outbound from the airport as well as flights crossing the airport’s airspace, graphs of flight volumes, flight numbers, plane tail numbers, arrival and departure times and airports, and estimated times in all time zones. How freaking cool is that?
For instance, one of the closer airports to me is KMSP, Minneapolis-St. Paul International. Information about this airport is located here. Want to see all flights in the air that are Airbus A320 planes? Just click here for that information.
Registering on their site is free and if you do, you can see more results on searches and even set up alerts, which will let you know when a particular flight or plane has arrived or departed an airport, etc. For instance, right now I’m tracking Donald Trump and Oprah’s jets; if they make a move, I’ll know it within a few minutes. (not that I give a smeg about either of them, but I think it’s fun to know something landed and/or took off) 
One of the coolest things on there is their 24-hour animation of the flight traffic over the US, which is a Quicktime animation located here. It’s the sort of thing that you’d love to have as a screensaver. If you would prefer to see the current status of flights, you can simply view their live page here.
All in all, it’s a *terribly* cool site and I wasn’t even aware that this information existed in the first place, but apparently it’s all public knowledge and they’re just doing the compilation. Sure, the stats are about 6 minutes behind realtime, but that’s close enough for most people who are curious about such things. I, personally, am going to try using it on days when I hear a jet going over my hometown and I look up to see contrails in the sky; I’ll just head on in, look up the current map for KMCW which is 30 miles north of me, and see what just buzzed my house.
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