For an app that sounds a touch geeky on the surface, Flightradar24 is wildly popular with aviation enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts alike.
Flightradar24 is today easily the world's best-loved flight tracker. It lets your phone or tablet become a live airplane radar monitor to track aircraft movements all over the world.
You can even point your device at an aircraft passing overhead or on the ground to identify what type it is and where it's heading.
The app is free and quite addictive once you get into it. Millions of people are using the app to track flights, get live information, and even follow news stories involving aircraft. It's fascinating, and the amount of info you can pull up in real-time is impressive. And it's all thanks to the transponders fitted to transmit aircraft position to air traffic control.
● Track aircraft using your local airport or flying anywhere in the world
● Get information on flights passing overhead
● See a 3D picture of the pilot's viewpoint
● Tap on any plane on your radar map and get full flight details
● Tap on airports for live arrival and departure boards
● Search for individual flights
What blows most laypeople away is the level of granular information you can find on individual aircraft.
For example, point your device at a jet flying overhead, and you will see all its flight details, including a picture of that individual aircraft.
When you tap on an aircraft on your zoomable radar map, you can access pretty much everything, including:
● Route
● Estimated Time of Arrival
● Actual departure time, not the scheduled time
● Aircraft type
● Speed and altitude
● High res image of the aircraft
● Historical flight data and playback of previous flights
Tapping on airports is equally informative. You can see in real-time:
● Live arrival and departure boards
● Flight status
● Which flights are delayed
● Which aircraft are on the ground
● Flight statuses
● Detailed weather conditions at the airport
You can also search by flight number, airport, or airline and filter flights using various criteria, including aircraft, altitude, speed, and airline.
And that's what you get for free! Trade up to a silver or gold subscription tier, and you can get even more.
Silver includes:
● 90-days worth of flight tracking history
● More detailed aircraft details such as serial number and age
● More detailed flight info, including vertical speed and squawk
● Filter and alerts to track individual flights
● Current weather at more than 3,000 airports overlaid on your radar map
Gold includes:
● Everything is silver, plus
● 365-days of flight history
● Detailed live weather map layers
● Air traffic control boundaries
● Extended in-flight data
● Aeronautical charts and oceanic flight tracks
● It's free
● Fun and interesting
● Incredibly detailed information
● Supports multiple languages
● Not for everyone
Flightradar24 is easy to use. If you can tap and zoom, you're sorted.
The app is downloadable from Google Play and Apple's App Store. The Android version's requirements vary by device, while iOS users need to part with 265.7 MB of storage and have iOS 10.0 or later.
