Having flown JetBlue between Boston and San Jose very frequently over the last 2 years, I had grown accustomed to seeing the very useful flight tracker powered by Mapquest (old flickr photo). For those who have never been on JetBlue (or flew Delta’s Song airline, when it was in service), the flight tracker shows you the course of your flight and shows geographically where your plane is on the map.
While working on Yahoo! Maps, I often wondered what benefit Mapquest had by providing JetBlue with the detailed maps and related data. Whatever incentive it was, it seems that privilege (or honor, or rights?) to power this flight tracker has now been given to Google. On this recent flight, I noticed the logo in the top right had switched from Mapquest to Google, and that the map images were a bit different and more enhanced.
I still don’t know what the real incentive is for either Mapquest, or Google (or Yahoo! if they wanted) to offer these tiles, other than to have their logo in front of those passengers on the plane. And, getting folks like me to blog about it and mention the word Google a couple of times.
Links: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_jetblue.php, http://crunchgear.com/2007/06/07/jetblue-uses-google-maps
Maybe its because of yahoo’s terms of service… no real-time GPS.
🙂
Your purpose is those who have never been on JetBlue or flew Deltaâ??s Song airline when it was in service the flight tracker shows me the course of my flight and shows geographically where your plane is on the map.