Travel planning site Trip.com offers a unique flight tracker that gives the real-time location of any North American, commercial airliner "currently in the air" according to the site.

You can locate the flight you're interested in by entering the airline and flight number, if you know it, or by entering the departure and arrival cities and the departure time.

Available information includes:

• Location
• Altitude
• Speed
• Equipment (type of plane)

Information can be viewed as text, or a graphical representation of the plane over a map of the U.S. (to indicate position) and control panel dials (to indicate speed, altitude and direction).

Entering the airline name and flight number will deliver the best results. A search with the airline and flight number correctly located a Los Angeles-to-Minneapolis America West flight on a layover on the ground in Phoenix. Searching for the same flight with just the Los Angeles departure time and Minneapolis destination did not return information on the target flight. (This presumably is due to this particular flight being re-designated as a Phoenix-to-Minneapolis flight after the layover.)