Home Flight Radar 24: Live Aircraft Tracking Across the Globe

Flight Radar 24: Live Aircraft Tracking Across the Globe

Want to know the best flight tracking system in the world? It’s Flightradar24! The fly radar is a service that allows anyone to track route of any commercial flight around the world on their flight radar. On top of knowing an aircraft’s location, you can use this service to track other flight details such as speed, altitude, and many more. Keep on reading to get all the information you need to use Flightradar24.

Facts & Figures

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  • More than 40 million app downloads.
  • Impressive ADS-B network with over 20,000 paired receivers.
  • Over 180,000 flights tracked per day.
  • #1 travel app on App Store in more than 150 countries.
  • More than two million users per day.
  • Used by major airlines and players in aviation, including Airbus and Boeing.

Main Functions

The flight radar 24 app provides excellent coverage with service across the United States, Europe, Canada, etc. Subsequently, it has become the leading service in terms of functionality, speed of providing the necessary information to the users due to high-quality and stable coverage of the resource. Currently, flight radar air traffic makes it easy to see specific popular flights of multiple airlines.

As to the main functionality of the site. The main features is the image of a visual map depicting aircraft in real time that performs regular flights. If you hover your mouse over the plane you need, at the same time, you will be provided with information about its board number, which consists of a set of certain numbers.

When you click on the desired aircraft, to the left of the interface, a dashboard will be opened with full details of the aircraft, namely:

  • Aircraft number;
  • Airplane’s flight number;
  • The name of the airport from which the aircraft departed and the name of the airport where the aircraft is heading and landing;
  • Total departure and arrival time;
  • The distance an aircraft crashes between two airports;
  • The distance traveled by plane, specifically at the time of your request;
  • Currently height of the aircraft;
  • The type of aircraft;
  • Information on aircraft registration data;
  • The distance that an airplane must fly to its destination;
  • The speed with which the aircraft flies, in the interface, the speed given is shown in the nodes. 1 node is equivalent to 1,852 kilometers per hour.

The paid subscription also provides users with no less important information about an aircraft such as:

  • Wind speed at the moment.
  • A serial number of the aircraft.
  • Year of a release of the aircraft.
  • The vertical speed at the moment.
  • Air temperature outside the airplane at the moment.
  • The wind speed at the nodes at the moment.
  • The actual speed of the aircraft, shown in the nodes.
  • 1 knot is equivalent to 1,852 kilometers per hour.

3D View

The new 3D View Flightrada24 gives you more to see than just facts. There is now an Outside View that includes a realistic 3D model of planes. Outside View allows the camera to move around the aircraft and zoom in and out, so you can follow a flight from whichever angle you’d like. You can move the camera to see what’s directly below an aircraft or see what the sky looks like above.

Moreover, a cockpit view is available, where you can see what the pilots see. In both views, you’re now able to continue viewing full flight information on the left-hand side of the screen. In the lower right corner, you can use the small moving map provided to give reference to the location of the flight you’re following in 3D view.

How To Use Flight Radar?

The software is designed and accessible to all people who have a standard computer, personal laptop, tablet or smartphone, all of these devices must provide the user with access to the Internet. Internet access provides users with the ability to monitor the route of the aircraft you need. Flightradar provides quality coverage in almost all countries of the world.
It is worth knowing that all information provided in the application for all aircraft updates every few seconds, it demonstrates the location of the aircraft on the map.

When you open the website, a map area will appear with many yellow symbols representing a plane in flight. It may look disorderly, but it’s actually air traffic in the world at this moment. If you’re ready, you can start following any flight immediately on the website.

How to resize map area

It is important to familiarise yourself with how to use the map, in order to make sense of it. Preliminary, we must consider the change of scale for the chosen section. When the map is first opened, very broad airspace appears. This represents a large area around your location. In order to make the section smaller you should click on the ‘Magnify’ button, represented by a plus (+) icon. Automatically the number of displayed aircraft is reduced, giving you a clearer view. When using live radar 24 on a mobile device, you can easily zoom in or out using the touch screen.

To move the selected map section up, down, left or right, click and hold on the map with your mouse and move accordingly. If you are using a mobile device, hold the touch screen and drag it in your desired direction. You would have successfully adjusted the map to track the particular flight that you are searching for.

Information window with details

In order to examine aeroplane in detail, you must click on the corresponding symbol on the Flightradar24 interactive map. A new window will open showing all the necessary details. For example, you will see the airline, aircraft type, flight number, and the cities the plane is travelling between. If you scroll down, you will find the live data about the plane’s speed, altitude, and the estimated time of arrival at the destination airport.

For the plane enthusiasts, there is an image of the aircraft that can go into enough detail that you can recognise individual elements such as redwings or painted advertising strips from the ground.

Searching for specific airports and flights

If you want to know what aeroplane just has flown above your head, you can do it! ll you have to do is, enter the name of the airport into the search box, then a map will instantly appear. Perhaps your location does not immediately appear, no stress. Simply drag the map until it shows the correct area. You can also change the setting of the map so that it shows a radius of your desired number of kilometres around your location. With that, you can easily track the majority of civil aircraft above you.

If you’d rather want to know the location of the plane transporting your close ones to another part of the world, then Flight radar 24 can help! In the search box, simply enter the flight number of the flight and its matching flight information will pop up. The new window will have a map displaying the requested plane with all the available information about it.

Mobile app

Take Flightradar24 with you wherever you go with the best flight tracker app for iOS and Android. See detailed information about each flight on a moving map in real-time or just point your device at the sky to see what flights are passing overhead. Download the official app of the best flight radar in the UK and other countries as well for free. Join thousands of people that track flights with Flightradar 24.

flightradar24 app

Working Principles

The entire process of transmitting information using ADS-B technology is carried out in the following way:

An aircraft, carrying ADS-B transponders on board, receives its own and accurate coordinates from the satellite.

The received data carries out the process of broadcasting through the transponder ether.

Earth ground station records the signal and transfers it to the Flightradar24 server.

All available data become available on the site, ultimately, the user has the opportunity to get a complete and true picture of the flight of the aircraft in real time.

ADS-B

The primary technology that Flightradar uses to receive flight information is called automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B). Its working principle is the following:

  • Aircraft gets its location from a GPS (satellite).
  • The ADS-B transponder on aircraft transmits a signal containing the location.
  • ADS-B signal is picked up by a receiver connected to Flightradar24.
  • Receiver feeds data to radar24.
  • Data is shown on the website and in the apps.

ADS-B is a relatively new technology, still under development, which means that today it’s rarely used by Air Traffic Control (ATC). Recent estimations show that roughly 70% of all commercial passenger aircraft (80% in Europe, 60% in the US) are equipped with an ADS-B transponder. For general aviation, this number is probably below 20%. The percentage of aircraft equipped with ADS-B receivers is steadily increasing, as they will become mandatory for most aircraft around the world by 2020. Once mandatory, ADS-B will replace primary radar as the primary surveillance method used by ATC.

Flight radar24 has a network of more than 20,000 ADS-B receivers around the world that receive flight information from aircraft and send it to the servers.

On cruising altitude (above 30,000 feet) Flight radar 24 covers 100% of Europe and the USA. There is also good ADS-B coverage in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, the Middle East, parts of South America, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and a few countries in Africa. In other parts of the world, the ADS-B coverage varies.

ADS-B

MLAT

In some regions where areas are covered by several FR24-receivers, there os a possibility to monitor positions of non-ADS-B equipped aircraft with the help of Multilateration (MLAT). This is done using a method known as Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA). By measuring the time it takes to receive the signal from aircraft with an older ModeS-transponder. Four receivers or more are needed to make MLAT work. MLAT coverage can only be achieved above roughly 3,000-10,000 feet. As the plane’s altitude increases, the probability that four or more receivers can receive the transponder signal increases as well.

Most parts of Europe and North America are today covered with MLAT above about 3,000-10,000 feet. There is also some MLAT coverage elsewhere with more areas getting MLAT coverage and the coverage is growing day by day.

Satellite

Satellites equipped with ADS-B receivers gather data from aircraft outside terrestrial ADS-B network’s coverage area and send that data to the Flightradar network. Satellite-based ADS-B data available on Flight radar comes from multiple providers. As the number of satellites supplying data and their location are dynamic, satellite coverage varies. Generally, satellite-based ADS-B increases coverage of flights over the ocean where ground-based reception is not possible. The only aircraft equipped with an ADS-B transponder may be tracked via satellite.

North America radar data

In addition to ADS-B and MLAT, there is North America Radar Data for flights there. This information is based on radar data and includes the most scheduled and commercial air traffic in the US and Canadian airspace, as well as parts of the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.

Flarm

Flarm is a simpler version of ADS-B with a shorter range, primarily used by smaller aircraft, mostly gliders. The range of a Flarm receiver is between 20 and 100 km. These receivers are often installed on small airports with a lot glider traffic to track the gliders around the airport.

Flying out of coverage Flight Radar 24

When an aircraft is flying out of coverage Flight radar keeps estimating the position of the aircraft for up to 2 hours. In settings, there is an option to set for how long time you want to see estimated aircraft on map.

Which Planes Track?

For today, the resource Flight Radar 24 monitors and provides information by the following types of aircraft:

  • ATR 72-600 (most new deliveries)
  • Antonov An-148 and An-158
  • All Airbus models (A300, A310, A318, A319, A320, A321, A330, A340, A350, A380)
  • BAe ATP
  • BAe Avro RJ70, RJ85, RJ100
  • Boeing 737, 747, 757, 767, 777, 787
  • Bombardier CRJ-900 (most new deliveries)
  • Bombardier CS100 and CS300
  • Embraer E190 (most new deliveries)
  • Fokker 70 and 100
  • McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and MD-11
  • Sukhoi SuperJet 100
  • Some newer Ilyushin and Tupolev (for example Il-96 and TU-204)

Video

Not counting your own website, blog, and Flightradar on Twitter, this service also has its own YouTube channel, where every person can view a huge amount of educational and entertaining video clips, and if desired, subscribe on the channel.

Tariff Plans

The basic Flightradar resource provides users free of charge. Paid subscription, as a rule, is more in demand from representatives of aviation business, if necessary, they can get more detailed information with limited access.

1. Basic tariff plan, which is provided free of charge

In this tariff plan, the user is provided with an opportunity to monitor in real time the desired haul, which makes it possible to access the necessary basic data quickly. The session duration is 30 minutes, upon the expiration of this time you need to refresh the page, however, in this case, all information will be lost but the other option is to purchase a paid subscription to the service. The significant disadvantages of a free account are that the view of the flight archive is given to the user only within 7 days Also, it contains a large amount of advertising.

2. Silver

In this tariff plan, you can use the service without a lot of advertising, the session lasts any amount of time, no need to reboot the site every 30 minutes. Also, there is an opportunity to use additional criteria that reflects the flight status of the aircraft. The archive information in this tariff package is displayed within 90 days.

3. Gold

In this tariff, the user has access to all features and options. The archive information in this tariff package is displayed within 365 days.

4. Business

In this tariff, the user has access to absolutely every service. The archive information in this tariff package is displayed within 730 days.

Service users can choose any of the resources offered by the site in accordance with their own needs, the need for different data and various information and any other requirements. In spite of your chosen tariff plan, Flight Radar 24 provides you with a pleasure in using fast and affordable information and a simple, intuitive interface, which has made the service so popular.