A reader tipped me about a couple of good mobile web sites of interest to pilots and air travelers. Thanks, Mike.

AeroPlanner is a flight planning tool for pilots. Registration at aeroplanner.com is required before you can use the mobile site. There are various levels of membership from free to $250/year. Even the free membership includes full access to the mobile site which has charts, flight plan viewing, detailed aviation weather reports, aviation calculators and a comprehensive directory of airports with landing fees, hours and fuel prices.

Content: Usability:

AeroPlanner mobile link: aeroplanner.com/mobile/

FlightAware’s a real-time flight tracking site with very detailed information including maps. FlightAware tracks both commercial and private flights as long as a flight plan exists and the owner of a private plane has not requested that tracking be blocked. Tracking is limited to US airspace.

The mobile version keeps the basic layout and content of the PC version but removes the ads and resizes maps to 180 px wide instead of 400. The resulting pages work well on SmartPhone browsers and Opera Mini but are too big, up to 70KB, for the built in browsers of feature phones. Usability could be better too, in particular, some links are a hard to read blue on a blue background in the mobile version. The same links in the full version are white on blue – much better. Still, if this site works on your phone, it gives an awesome amount of detail including detailed listings of aircraft features and equipment, forums and even features on interest to pilots like runway diagrams and an IFR Route Analyzer.

Content: Usability:

FlightAware mobile link: flightaware.com/mobile/