AirplaneTracker

About this site

Airplane Tracker plots aircraft that are broadcasting their position right now, on a map, for free. There is no account, no app and no paywall.

Where the positions come from

Almost every airliner and a large share of business and general aviation continuously broadcasts ADS-B — an unencrypted radio signal carrying the aircraft's identity, position, altitude and speed. Thousands of volunteers run receivers and pool what they hear into open networks.

We read two of those networks: adsb.lol as the primary source and adsb.fi as a fallback, both under the Open Database License. We run no receivers of our own and contribute no data — this site is a reader of a commons other people built, and we are grateful for it.

Airport details come from OurAirports (public domain) and airline details from OpenFlights (ODbL). Maps are © OpenStreetMap contributors.

What this site cannot tell you

Being straight about the limits matters more than looking comprehensive:

  • It is not a schedule. We show aircraft transmitting at this moment. There is no way to look up a past flight, a future one, a departure time or a gate. For those, ask the airline or the airport.
  • Coverage follows receivers, and receivers follow people. Over oceans, poles and empty interiors there is frequently nobody listening, and aircraft drop off the map until they are back in range. They have not vanished; we have stopped hearing them.
  • Some aircraft are absent by design. Military and privately-blocked aircraft may not appear at all.
  • Positions lag. We reuse each snapshot for up to 45 seconds to be a good citizen of a volunteer network, and the map redraws every 30 seconds.

None of this is suitable for navigation or flight planning, and must not be used for either.

Who publishes this, and how it is paid for

Airplane Tracker is published by Pavlus Travel, a full-service travel agency in Albuquerque, New Mexico that has been planning cruises and escorted tours since 1994.

The tracker is free and always will be. It is paid for by the travel Pavlus sells: the hotel search, the cruise search, and the advertisement that appears in the corner of most pages. Those are all Pavlus, they are all labelled, and clicking them is entirely optional. We are not affiliated with any airline and we do not sell airline tickets.

Nothing on this site is ranked, ordered or filtered by what pays us — the aircraft you see are simply the ones transmitting nearby.

Privacy

We set no tracking cookies and run no third-party analytics or advertising scripts. The ad in the corner remembers the last airport you looked at, in your own browser's local storage, so it can show something relevant; that never leaves your device and clearing your browser data erases it. The full detail is on the privacy page.

Something wrong?

If an airport, airline or aircraft is shown incorrectly, tell us — most such errors are in the open reference data, and reporting them upstream fixes them for everyone.