Plane Answers: 5 things to look for on your next flight {Gadling}

Nov 13th 2009 4:24AM If you're on United, you can listen to ATC communications on most flights. I do this all the time and once you learn the locations of the major VORs, departure and arrival routes etc then you know where you are just by hearing the names as well as the handoffs between the different enroute centers.

Another cool thing you can do is use a GPS to see where you are - on the Garmin car units, they have an "Off Road" mode that stops if from snapping your position to roads - as long as you can get the satellite signal at your seat, you can see exactly where you are. It's pretty funny seeing 500 mph as your "driving" speed haha. The newer phones with GPS like the Droid should be able to do this too using Google Maps Navigation.