Calculate location of past flight (for engagement purposes)

[lunne]

One year ago, I got engaged on a Singapore Airlines flight between Houston and Manchester.

I'm now trying to figure out where exactly we were and what the local time was where the plane was at the time of engagement (as I'm not sure whether we got engaged on the 11th or 12th local time, the anniversary date is a bit... ambiguous).

I've played around with FlightAware but can't get it to work for my purposes Is there someone who can figure it out and/or point me to a data source that could help me?

Flight SQ 51 (IAH-MAN)
Departure Sun 11 Dec at 18:50 from IAH
Time of engagement 22:02 (according to the first pic with the ring on)

Thanks in advance!

 

[RB]

One year ago, I got engaged on a Singapore Airlines flight between Houston and Manchester.

I'm now trying to figure out where exactly we were and what the local time was where the plane was at the time of engagement (as I'm not sure whether we got engaged on the 11th or 12th local time, the anniversary date is a bit... ambiguous).

I've played around with FlightAware but can't get it to work for my purposes Is there someone who can figure it out and/or point me to a data source that could help me?

Flight SQ 51 (IAH-MAN)
Departure Sun 11 Dec at 18:50 from IAH
Time of engagement 22:02 (according to the first pic with the ring on)

Thanks in advance!

Maybe within your photos. I find that within google photos the info section of each photo gives me pretty good info

 

[tdimdad]

Congrats on your engagement! Must have been the most memorable flight for you two! Happy travels through life to you!

Assuming the engagement happened 3h 10 mins after the departure, you may have been somewhere east of Boston, just arrived to the Atlantic. A few days ago the same flight departed at 18:50 and the location at 3h10 later is shown in the screen capture below.
The flight paths keep varying slightly between flights but for the sake of naming the place and time, perhaps you can use Boston as the location and whatever the Eastern Time was there at that point.

 

[dajop]

Maybe within your photos. I find that within google photos the info section of each photo gives me pretty good info

Can do with iPhone too. You open the photo, swipe up and then brings up the info. Clicking on adjust will show the time zone that the time stamp indicates.

 

[lunne]

Thanks @tdimdad for the congrats! I was lucky in that we were more or less alone in the smaller biz cabin (SIA crew was as always great). Thanks also for the breakdown, that's most helpful! I was thinking along similar lines as I don't think our flight would've made it to the next time zone over Nova Scotia (which would have tipped us past midnight and into the following day).

As for the iPhone photos, the location was sadly not included (perhaps because of Airplane mode?).

 

[tdimdad]

I find that the GPS on my phone (Android) is very much lacking while inside a plane. If you have an iPhone, does that track your location while flying, e.g. can you open an offline map and see where you are?

 

[SYD]

I find that the GPS on my phone (Android) is very much lacking while inside a plane. If you have an iPhone, does that track your location while flying, e.g. can you open an offline map and see where you are?

Sometimes but often not on larger aircraft. Although this year, I notice my phone was following our flight path on a couple of Embraer flights using an offline map app.

Occasionally you might get position info from the inflight wifi but again not very often IME.

 

[Quickstatus]

Would a one time subscription to Flightradar24 give the historical flight path for that flight? How long does FR24 keep such data?

 

[sudoer]

I have complimentary FR24 and FlightAware subscriptions through contributing ADS-B data via PiAware.

According to FR24, SQ51 11DEC22 was operated by 9V-SMP. At 2022-12-12T04:02:18Z the coordinates were 42.318787,-69.083031. Altitude 39000, ground speed 530 kts, track 60 degrees.

Boston is UTC-5, so local time would have been 11:02pm on 11 December.

Flight data CSV attached (I attached as a TXT to get around file type restriction on AFF)

 

[lunne]

Thank you so much @sudoer, amazing

No more confusion about our whereabouts, brilliant!

 

[sudoer]

Thank you so much @sudoer, amazing

No problem at all - only took a minute or two.

A belated congratulations on your engagement, I hope the crew had champagne at the ready!

 

[dajop]

Sometimes but often not on larger aircraft. Although this year, I notice my phone was following our flight path on a couple of Embraer flights using an offline map app.

Worked a treat on the A220 for me earlier this year travelleing GVA-LHR too. But for bigger planes can be totally hit and miss.

As for the iPhone photos, the location was sadly not included (perhaps because of Airplane mode?).

Yes, although the main thing is if you ever need to work out the timezone of the timestamp on the photo, you can do it using that way. So you can confirm in your situation that the picture was taken at 22:02 based on time of departure (GMT-6), and that it didn't somehow pick up another time zone.