Given all the confusion about U.S. flights these days, many consumers are turning to flight-tracking Web sites to find out what is happening to flights with friends and family on them.

Here's how I was able to use it after the American Airlines 587 went down. My wife realized her brother, his wife and infant son were flying from Amsterdam to San Francisco on KLM at about the same time. Naturally, she was concerned about the flight's progress. We turned to FlightView.com, where we put in the flight number and were given an instant report that told us the flight was making its way over North America: "1708 mi NNE of Montreal, Quebec, Canada" (translation, 1,708 miles north northeast of Montreal). This resulted in much relief all 'round.

There are several flight trackers on the Web which get their data from the Federal Aviation Administration. Some, like FlightView, have no delays -- according to Jim Steinberg, co-owner of the site's parent company, RLM Software -- while others have about a 15-20 minute delay. Trip.com's flight tracker offers a graphical version that has a picture of a little airplane that you can watch as it moves across the map.

FlightView and Trip.com track all commercial flights that go into, out of and over the United States and Canada -- so you will not be able to find, say, flights within China.

FlightView also has a page that allows you to get a snapshot of all the commercial flights airborne over North America at any one time. As I write this, there are 3,030 flights in the air (not counting the flights grounded at the New York-area airports). The page changes every 15 minutes and highlights flights into a different airport each time.

And, in case you are wondering, flights that crash or have accidents are immediately removed from the system, so if you tried to see what happened to the downed AA flight, it would come back with an error message.

Flight Trackers:
http://www.FlightView.com
http://www.trip.com/trs/trip/flighttracker/flight_tracker_home.xsl
http://www.flightarrivals.com

Once you try these out, do write in to techguru@sree.net and let me know about your thoughts on flight tracking.

Send your feedback -- and ideas for coverage: techguru@sree.net

Sree's Site of The Week

Ajeeb.com
http://www.ajeeb.com

As you may have recently read, Al Jazeera, the controversial Arabic all-news channel, is going to launch an English-language version of its site -- aljazeera.net, not dot-com -- next year.

If you can't wait that long to see what Al Jazeera and other Arabic sites are saying about the war in Afghanistan and beyond, then Ajeeb is the site for you. It provides instant, free translation of Arabic web sites into English.

Like FreeTranslation.com and world.altavista.com, which do two-way translations for English and French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc, Ajeeb gives you what is known as a "gist" translation. Basically allowing you to get the flavor of the wording, if not an exact translation. Useful stuff when you know no Arabic at all.

You can go through either the front page of Ajeeb.com and click on "Translation" (using the "Translate" box at the front of Ajeeb.com will not give you an English translation, so make sure you find your way to that inside page). You then type in the URL of an Arabic site and it will go to work on all the HTML text on the page, not the graphics themselves.

I have been using it to visit AlJazeera.net, AlAhram.org.eg (the big Egyptian Paper) and www.bbc.co.uk/arabic (BBC's Arabic-language Web site). I almost never venture beyond the headlines, but that's enough to get a sense of what's going on.

Ajeeb.com
http://www.ajeeb.com

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