Aviation Geeks — live flight tracker

This is a live flight tracker. When you follow a flight, the map shows the aircraft's current position, the path it has already flown, and a dashed great-circle line pointing to its destination. The flown trace is colored by altitude, so a glance tells you where the aircraft climbed and descended, and the great-circle line is simply the shortest route over the curve of the Earth, which is why it can look curved on a flat map.

Aircraft positions come from ADS-B, a signal most airliners broadcast continuously that reports their GPS position, altitude and speed. A community network of volunteer receivers picks up those broadcasts and pools them through adsb.lol, the open data source this map is built on. Flight schedules and airframe details, such as the route, scheduled times, aircraft model and registration, come from AeroDataBox.

To start, search a flight number, for example LX318, or an aircraft's tail number, also called its registration, for example HB-JDD. You can also click any aircraft on the map to follow it. Use the date picker to pull up a flight from an earlier day, and drag the playback bar to replay a journey from takeoff, sped up if you like.

A few limits are worth knowing. On the free tier, tracking history reaches back only about the last 24 hours. Coverage depends on how many volunteer receivers are nearby, so remote regions and oceans can have gaps. And nothing shown here is intended for navigation or any other operational use.