The receivers have a range of a few hundred miles, though they struggle with terrain such as mountains. That’s allowed Flightradar24 to go from a couple of receivers in Sweden, when the site was founded in 2007, to a huge network with more than 30,000 receivers around the world, many of them run by volunteers.

Photograph: Flightradar24Īnyone can set up an ADS-B receiver using inexpensive kits. They will figure out what flight their favorite player is on, and they will follow that flight.”įlight trackers rely on a new open-standard surveillance technology called automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B), which allows planes to transmit their locations and other information to anyone with a receiver.Ī Flightradar24 receiver kit. “We see the most interest during the European football transfer window,” Petchenik said. As transfer deadline day approaches, it also becomes an essential tool for sports fans. It’s not just global news events that spark upticks in site traffic. Just imagine the attention, Petchenik says, if you could have watched Nixon going to China in real time. Another draw, Petchenik says, is the experience of watching flights with others and discussing them on social media. If the newspaper is the first draft of history, then this is the pre-write.” Flight tracker data has virtually no lag, providing a raw sense of immediacy.

The appeal is simple, Petchenik said: “You get to participate in history in real time. Viewers also used the site to follow the US’s chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan. Thousands more tracked a US air force Global Hawk traveling around Ukraine during the Russian invasion before flying out over the Black Sea. In total, 2.92 million people tuned in to watch some portion of her flight, about three times as many people as followed it on CNN in prime time.įlightradar24 has had some other big moments of late: roughly 550,000 viewers tracked the flight of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, as he returned to Moscow in 2021 to face imprisonment. The amount of traffic made the Flightradar24 “unstable for some users” and the site was forced to limit access at certain points. Ian Petchenik, the head of communications for Flightradar24, said the site had seen “unprecedented sustained interest” over Pelosi’s flight, and at its peak, a record 708,000 people were simultaneously watching the little red icon representing the House speaker’s Boeing C-40C – callsign SPAR19 – as it looped around the Philippines to bypass Chinese bases in the South China Sea, then soared across the Luzon Strait, reportedly under the watchful cover of a trio of US aircraft carriers, and arced across Taiwan’s mountain ranges before touching down in Taipei.

Radar 24 flight tracker live images