What's Overhead

Nice find, Walt.

Here's an iPhone app that will let you point the phone at at aircraft in the sky overhead and then return the identification info.

http://planefinder.net/about/

US Airways still shows up on radar screens with the AWE (inherited from America West) prefix. It should be changed over to AAL in about six months.

When America West's parent company provided the financing for US Airways to exit bankruptcy a few years ago, its management elected to adopt the US Airways name because of the greater brand recognition. In a nod to the America West heritage, however, they retained the "Cactus" call sign and the AWE code. It was a nice gesture, but it's caused a lot of confusion with ATC. No one in Europe, evidently, has any idea what a cactus is, and many controllers see "AWE" on their screens and confuse it with Air Wisconsin.

"USA" was pretty hard to misconstrue.