Aircraft in the sky right now
Live air traffic map: thousands of aircraft from ADS-B receivers. Click a plane to see its flight, route and track; find a flight, an airframe or an airport with the search box.
Data: OpenSky Network (global snapshot), adsb.fi and adsb.lol (detailed ADS-B positions, non-commercial use), OurAirports (airports), VRS standing data (routes and airlines, CC0), aviationweather.gov (METAR/TAF), FAA (NOTAMs). Map © OpenStreetMap contributors.
How the flight map works
Almost every airliner broadcasts an ADS-B message once a second: its unique 24-bit address, callsign, GPS position, barometric altitude, ground speed and track. Thousands of hobbyist receivers around the world pick those messages up and feed open networks such as OpenSky Network, adsb.fi and adsb.lol. This map combines them: a global OpenSky snapshot every two minutes, plus detailed positions from the ADS-B networks every ten seconds for the region you are currently looking at. That is why planes move much more smoothly once you zoom in, and why registrations and aircraft types appear in the card.
Between updates each aircraft is advanced along its track at its ground speed, so the motion looks continuous rather than jumpy. Icon colour encodes altitude: grey aircraft are on the ground or taxiing, green ones are climbing out or on approach below 10,000 ft, blue ones fly at 10–25 thousand, violet at the usual cruise levels of 25–40 thousand, and pink above 40,000 ft, which is mostly business jets and military traffic. Click a plane to see its route and the last 24 hours of track; the links lead to the flight page and to the airframe page with 30 days of history.
A callsign is not the same thing as a flight number. On air the aircraft transmits an ICAO callsign such as BAW117 (British Airways flight 117), while the departure board shows the same flight as BA117 using the IATA code. The search understands both. The origin–destination route comes from the callsign database maintained by Virtual Radar Server volunteers, so charters, positioning flights and private aircraft often have none: they either fly without a fixed callsign or transmit their registration instead. A registration such as G-EUUU or N12345 belongs to one airframe and does not change from flight to flight.
Coverage is not complete. Over oceans, Siberia, Africa and Central Asia there are few receivers, so an aircraft can vanish mid-route and reappear near a coast. Some military and state aircraft fly without ADS-B or with degraded data, and a few private owners ask the networks not to display them. Data arrives with a delay of a few seconds to two minutes and is meant for watching, not for navigation or flight decisions. Sources: OpenSky Network, adsb.fi and adsb.lol (positions), OurAirports (airports), Virtual Radar Server standing data (routes and airlines), aviationweather.gov (METAR and TAF weather), FAA (NOTAMs).