FlightAware's new tracker for popular airport traffic

FlightAware, a service which provides information about commercial and general aviation air traffic, has a new feature in beta test which allows you to see the most popular carriers which fly between two airports and the typical prices for tickets in that market.

As an example, the site shows that for traffic between Detroit and San Francisco, 42% of flights taken were direct on Northwest Airlines, and the most popular connections to that airport were via Phoenix (US Airways), Minneapolis (Northwest), Las Vegas (US Airways) and Chicago Midway (Southwest). For those direct flights on Northwest, the median price for the year was $228.90; the median flyer on Frontier, which only captured 3 percent of the market with its flights through Denver, paid only $150.06.

FlightAware is also one of the online services that tracks flights to local airports, including live and historical information for Ann Arbor Municipal Airport, Willow Run Airport, and even smaller airfields like Canton-Plymouth-Mettetal Airport in Plymouth. Other services that provide some similar data include AirNav and Skyvector.

Edward Vielmetti collects maps for AnnArbor.com. Contact him at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com.