If you find perusing real-world flight tracking sites like www.flightaware.com as amusing as I do, then you'll love this: Tim Krajcar has created a similar tool for VATSIM called "vataware."

As VATSIM explains it, vataware is "a sophisticated traffic analysis & history tool for VATSIM data. It can be used to look at trends in traffic by country, airport, airline, or pilot. It also tracks a 'radar plot' of a flight (with datapoints taken every two minutes) so a pilot can see what route s/he ended up flying."

This tool is nothing short of amazing. It tracks every IFR and VFR flight that has a flight plan filed in the VATSIM system. You can search by country, airport, airline, callsign, citypair, or pilot. Data is provided via gorgeous charts, graphs, and lists that tell you more than you ever wanted to know about what's happening on VATSIM at any given moment...or earlier today...or a few hours from now.

Click on an individual flight and you'll find information about that flight: status, operator, pilot, aircraft, origin, destination, route, remarks, altitude, speed, distance/time to go and more--as well the aircraft's flight-planned route (and progress along it) plotted on a map.

As a VATSIM controller, I'm finding vataware to be incredibly useful: the virtual equivalent of the air traffic management tools real-world controllers have access to. Whether you're a controller, a pilot, or just curious about what's happening on VATSIM, I highly encourage you to take a look at vataware: www.vataware.com.