#flight tracking

me, immediately checking here to see what plane it is, where are they flying from, where are they flying to:

Do not repost.

We are now around the halfway point of the 2022-23 NHL season, so it’s time to check in with our favorite cursed airplane! N803TJ has transported 8 teams to 28 road games across the first half of the season, and those teams have not had enjoyable trips. At 6-21-0, N803TJ is rocking a road win percentage of 0.222, which—if it was a team—would put it dead last in the league.

But how does that compare to a typical road record?

On average, the road team will win an NHL game around 45% of the time. This win percentage has been slowly trending up over the years—road teams won only 42.6% of regular season games across the league in the 2005-06 season, but won 46.3% of games in the 2021-22 season. Of course, there’s variation from season to season—in 2010-11, the road win percentage got all the way up to 48.1%, and the more recent 2017-18 season it dipped to 43.7%—and the averages for the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season and the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons must be taken with a grain of salt, but the general trend shows that road wins are more common now than they were 17 years ago. In the regular season, home ice advantage seems to be disappearing.

Fig. 1. Road win percentages by season from 2005-06 to 2021-22. Note that 2012-13, 2019-20, and 2020-21 are shortened seasons.

Unless, of course, the road team flew in on N803TJ.

Fig. 2. Distribution of road win percentages from 2005-06 to 2021-22.

N803TJ's current 0.222 win percentage is 3.8 standard deviations below the 2005-06 to 2021-22 league-wide mean win percentage of 0.453, and 8 mean absolute deviations below the mean. It is clearly an outlier compared to how road games usually go.

This discrepancy can’t be entirely chalked up to N803TJ carrying bad teams around, either. Yes, the struggling Columbus Blue Jackets have been the most frequent passenger on N803TJ, but the third most frequent traveler on N803TJ this season has been the league-leading Boston Bruins. The Bruins boast a road record of 13-4-1, which is a stunning points percentage of 0.750. When looking only at their four road games when flying on N803TJ, however, that drops to .500. It’s a small sample size, yes, but it’s still an indication of how powerfully cursed the Blighted Beast is that it can reduce the strongest team in the league to odds like a coin flip.

As for the Penguins, the effects of N803TJ on this season are crystal clear. The Penguins' seven game west coast losing streak in late October-early November kicked off with the team's first meeting with N803TJ, on a flight from Columbus to Edmonton. Their first game after the Christmas break was also a road loss on N803TJ. They are 1-6-0 (0.143) in seven road games after flying on the Blighted Beast; their overall road record is 10-9-2 (0.524), which means that in road games that the Penguins flew to on a different plane, they are 9-3-2 (0.714). It's as if there are two separate Penguins teams that show up to road games, and which one you get depends entirely on which plane they take to get there.

Just passing through!

More than a dozen cargo jets from FedEx, UPS and Maersk (jets contracted to UPS) line up at Cologne/Bonn (CGN) Airport in far-western Germany.

This airport is the major European hub for UPS. The FedEx jet in the foreground is, apparently, just passing through to a connecting cargo terminal facility.

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