“My last travel consisted of 6 flights (the guy was flying from Russia to Beijing, Singapore, Jakarta, and all the way back. Click a city name to see how ArrivedOK auto-updates his Twitter status – Editor). Entering all of them into ArrivedOK manually might take time. Fortunately ArrivedOK is integrated with TripIt, so all I needed to do was just forwarding all my booking confirmation emails and e-tickets to TripIt and then importing those records to ArrivedOK. Follow these steps to do it:

1. You should have a registration with TripIt.com. If you don’t, go to their website and sign-up.
2. Forward all your booking confirmation emails and e-tickets to plans@tripit.com
3. Assuming you have an ArrivedOK account, sign-in to ArrivedOK and select New Record. You will see “Import from Tripit” link.
4. Click it and ArrivedOK will import all your new flights and will offer you to edit them. At that stage you can specify your cell phone to track and notifications for all of your flights. Or you can do this later.
5. Don’t forget to make the newly imported records ‘Active’ by clicking the button in the Records Menu.

Now you are ready to fly. Happy landings!”

Dear beta testers,

As you know, we’ve cancelled the limitation on the number of tracking records for the public beta period. Now you can track as many your arrivals as you want (actually, there’s 20 tracking records limitation, but we think it’s quite enough even for frequent flyers).

We also decided to extend the public beta testing of ArrivedOK until 30 August 2009. Please don’t forget that 100 beta testers, who submit us most valuable from our point of view feedback will win 1-year free ArrivedOK subscription!

And one more thing: the long-awaited ArrivedOK US is coming soon!

• “Can I import trips from TripIt so I don’t have to fill everything in?”
• “Linking to tripit.com – that would be really magic.”
• “I use www.tripit.com for all my travels. Please use their RSS feed to create records for me.”

These are quotes from our beta-testers’ emails.

Following these requests we want to announce that ArrivedOK has just integrated with TripIt and made the import of flight records stored in TripIt available to its users. You can find that option at ‘Create event‘ page. It is really a one-click feature. Please check it out and let us know what you think about it.

About TripIt

You might be interesting to know that we just launched ArrivedOK Facebook application. Now you can easily share your arrival alerts with your Facebook friends.

If you’re a Facebook user just go to that page and add the application to your Facebook account. You don’t need anything to do with your ArrivedOK settings. Facebook will automatically appear in the list of your web services under ‘My blogs’ tab in your ArrivedOK profile.

For support inquiries, please visit our Support page
Follow ArrivedOK on Twitter: twitter.com/arrivedok

Facebook is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

I thought of dissecting all review sites. However, I could find only 2 such sites — which reviewed flight trackers. They are good (up to one’s criteria, of course) so I will use them as a starting point.

I have also used information presented in the next (upper) post. It’s focused only on mobile flight trackers.

In this post, I am reviewing different flight trackers. I have also chosen the best 5.

My Top 5 Flight Trackers list is the following:

• FlightStats.com
• FlyteComm.com
• FBOWeb.com
• FlightAssist.com
• OAG STAR Alliance

To compile the rating, I used this source. It’s called “MAKE USE OF” and it reviews the following flight trackers.

* FBOWeb.com

They call it the “mother” of all flight tracker sites. Well, the list of features is indeed impressive:
-departure time
-estimated arrival time
-progress bar
-automatically updating map
-integration with Google Earth
-real time updating with the flight’s location and altitude coordinates
-Air Traffic Control (ATC) live audio feeds

Major problem: only tailored to the US, including airspace. Meaning: when tracking even a US originated flight like Aeroflot’s 316 from JFK you get “This flight is currently being tracked by London, UK radar facilities, and is restricted” (i.e. it is flying overseas). Oh-oh.

This service also require subscription (for some features). The second source, searchenginewatch.com, also points to this source, for its Google Earth integration.

* FlightStats.com

I think it is the father of tracking sites because even Google uses it for its information about “flight SU316″-like searches.

It also has widgets, facebook applications, and RSS feeds for airport delays.

It also supplies an “information-delayed-by” time which is a nice and rare feature. And estimated times of.. even departure! (Even though my test’s SU316 is scheduled to take off only 14 hours later, I see that it is scheduled for 1/2 hour later departure that’s probably true. A build-in lateness? JFK has to adjust schedules!)

Also the coverage is claimed to be the best in the world: “We cover more commercial passenger flights than anyone in the world. In addition to our complete coverage of North American flights, we cover flights operating in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and just about everywhere else.”

Feels like I would put this source in the first place. What do you think? Vote in this post!

Well, information on local flights looks complete (at least for Novosibirsk, Russia). Moreover, tracking flights by date (that I could not initiate on FBOWeb.com) is helpful since many transatlantic flight fly into the other day.

* FlightView.com

Lets you search for flights by airline and flight number or by city and time. Be sure to check out the airport traffic map which shows flights going into and out of major U.S. cities.

Even though it is mentioned by the two reviewers, I could not find any interesting specifics. US only.

* FlightAware.com

offers flight tracking, data analysis, statistics, and graphs, mobile access and a ton of other features. Impressive! Mentioned by the two reviewers.

* FlyteComm.com

More of the same variety. Also mentioned by the two. Different by the user interface.

Now, it is all good. But most of the reviewed sites are online (web) trackers. What if the cable is down, computer does not boot or you are in a taxicab? Remember my requirements? Well, I think mobile access (and not only from iPhone or SmartPhone!) is a MUST-HAVE. What is out there in terms of mobile support? My colleague has helped me with the mobile tracker list which is in the next (upper) post.

Here I will review two mobile trackers: OAG STAR Alliance and FlightAssist.

OAG Star Alliance will send SMS alerts if the schedule has changed or so did the departure/arrival estimated times. The service is free. But it only covers STAR Alliance airlines. Therefore, my test with Aeroflot fails.

FlightAssist offers SMS (cell phone text) notifications about arrival/departure, status confirmation, reminders and alerts if something has changed (estimated arrival/departure times) around the world. The cost is .99 cents per alert. Didn’t try it but looks good!

By the way, as always, similar information can be found on the airport’s and/or the airline’s websites (also with mobile capabilities).

UPDATE:

http://www.flightarrivals.com/ – something new, I guess, beta status, but failed S7 Airlines test

http://www.flightexplorer.com –  a desktop app; US, Canada or New Zealand; failed S7 Airlines test.