Live Flight Radar — Track Planes in Real Time_
10–20k 20–33k
33–40k 40k+ ft
airport
Guide — see what is flying overhead in 30 seconds
Pick a spot, set the range, click a plane.
Press 📍 Near me or pick one of 21 major airports from the Location list.
Drag the slider from 25 to 250 nautical miles. The distance rings resize with it.
Open callsign, registration, type, altitude, speed, heading, vertical rate, squawk and distance.
Show only planes below 10,000 ft, 10–30k or 30k+, hide ground traffic, and sort by distance, altitude, speed or callsign.
Press 🎯 Follow to keep the map centred on one aircraft. Drag the map to stop following.
Reading the radar
- grey-blue
- On the ground
- cyan
- Below 10,000 ft
- green
- 10,000–20,000 ft
- yellow
- 20,000–33,000 ft
- orange
- 33,000–40,000 ft
- purple
- Above 40,000 ft
- fading trail
- The last 16 reported positions
- straight line
- Where the plane will be in about 1 minute at its current speed and track
- dashed rings
- Distance from the centre every 25, 50 or 100 nm
- green bubble
- A cluster of planes when you zoom out — click to zoom in
- pink
- Flagged as military in the ADS-B database
- red + ⚠
- Emergency: squawk 7500, 7600, 7700 or an emergency status
- MLAT
- Position worked out by several receivers instead of sent by the plane
Live flight radar: how it works
This live flight radar shows which aircraft are in the sky around you right now. It reads open ADS-B data from the adsb.lol community network (with adsb.fi as a backup), draws every plane on a map in your browser and refreshes every 10 seconds. There is nothing to install and no account to create.
What is ADS-B?
ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) is how most modern aircraft announce themselves: the transponder broadcasts the plane's GPS position, altitude, speed and identity about twice a second on 1090 MHz. Anyone with a receiver in range can pick it up, so thousands of volunteers run small antennas and share what they hear. When a plane only sends altitude and identity, several receivers can still work out its position from the signal arrival times; the detail panel labels those positions MLAT.
Why are some planes missing?
A plane only appears when it broadcasts ADS-B and a volunteer receiver nearby hears it. Most airliners show up, but some military, private and older aircraft do not, and low-flying traffic far from a receiver drops out. Coverage is strongest over Europe and North America and thin over oceans and remote areas.
What is a squawk code?
A squawk is the four-digit transponder code a plane is flying with. Air traffic control normally assigns one per flight. Pilots flying under visual rules without a code use 7000 in most of Europe and 1200 in the United States. Three codes are reserved for emergencies: 7500 (unlawful interference), 7600 (radio failure) and 7700 (general emergency). This radar shows those in red; they are rare.
Why does a plane say “ground”?
The aircraft is reporting that it is on the ground — taxiing, parked or just landed — instead of an altitude. Untick the ground-traffic box to hide these.
Live flight radar vs Flightradar24 and FlightAware
The idea is the same: volunteer receivers feeding a live map. This page is a single free tool with no account, no ads and no tracking, focused on a quick local view. It has no flight history, schedules or airline data; the detail panel links to FlightAware, Flightradar24 and ADS-B Exchange when you want to look a flight up there.
Data, map and privacy
The browser cannot call adsb.lol or adsb.fi directly (they send no CORS headers), so each refresh goes through the r.jina.ai reader proxy. That request contains the centre of the map, rounded to 3 decimals (about 100 m), and the radius. If you press “Near me”, your browser's location is only used to set that centre; this site does not store or log it. The base map is Esri's Dark or Light Gray Canvas over OpenStreetMap data.
Not for navigation
Positions are near real time — usually a few seconds old — but community ADS-B data can be delayed, incomplete or wrong. Use it for plane spotting and curiosity, never for navigation, flight planning or any operational decision.