Why do airplanes only sometimes have the “data block” next to them with flight information?
Due to limited screen and resolution real estate, FlightAware Maps has to selectively “de-clutter” the maps so that data blocks aren’t overlapping each other. If you’re tracking a single flight and it’s near the origin or destination airport, it might not have a data block to ensure that the airport code itself isn’t blocked. On the ATC-style displays with many flights, often times there are so many flights in limited space that it’s not possible to display data blocks for all of them. In future iterations of the software, a more powerful zoom feature will alleviate this problem.
