Flight Radar 24 glitch?

[Marin B]

I was looking at FR24 for flights in the area this morning and it showed a couple of Alaska Airline flights near each other and within a few hundred feet of each other. Both departed Seattle, one was headed to San Jose (AS318) and the other to Ontario (AS530). Ontario is about 350 miles south of San Jose, but FR24 showed AS530 descending at about the same rate as AS318. After AS318 landed I couldn't find AS530. I went to the Alaskan Airlines website and it showed that the flight had been canceled. I presume this is a glitch and wonder what caused it?

 

[Mick West]

I think they use flight plans in the absence of any other data, so if they don't know the flight has been cancelled, then there will still be a kind of ghost plane. It's a computed position, and not actually ADS-B data:

 

[deirdre]

since as530 was cancelled, perhaps they stuck those passengers on As318 to san jose where they would have to get a connecting flight to Ont. ? although not sure why they would bother to note that in FR.

 

[Mick West]

Replay shows just one plane

 

[Marin B]

Next to the AS530 flight number it says "no call sign", so maybe that's an indication that the flight path is not based on actual radar and it tracks the closest plane that is, which would explain why the tracking stopped at that last screen shot.