Inside the website Flightradar24 tracks every aircraft in the sky

• Over 200,000 planes take off and land worldwide each day on average.
• The majority of them have a transponder, which transmits the aircraft’s position and other flight information to air traffic control.
• In a nutshell, that’s what flight-tracking websites do—they give viewers a real-time view of everything that’s in the sky (minus a few exceptions).

Over 200,000 planes take off and land worldwide each day on average. This comprises corporate jets, private aircraft, helicopters, air ambulances, government and military aircraft, drones, hot air balloons, and gliders, which together make up nearly half of the total number of aircraft.

The majority of them have a transponder, which transmits the aircraft’s position and other flight information to air traffic control. Low-cost receivers based on the ADS-B, or automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, technology may pick up this signal. In a nutshell, that’s what flight-tracking websites do—they give viewers a real-time view of everything that’s in the sky (minus a few exceptions).

That now extends well beyond merely aircraft aficionados. Over 700,000 people saw the landing of a US Air Force plane carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan in early August live on the flight-tracking website Flightradar24.

The aircraft, a military version of the Boeing 737 known as the C-40, took off from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia before beginning its hour-long detour to Taiwan in order to avoid running afoul of the Chinese military. The fact that the destination wasn’t immediately clear sparked discussions online as the plane steadily steered north towards the island. As a result, 2.92 million people tracked the seven-hour flight on Flightradar24, making it the most followed flight of all time.

According to FlightRadar24’s director of communications, Ian Petchenik, the website was created in Sweden in 2006 as a method to promote a flight price comparison service. It is one of a number of well-known flight-tracking services, along with Flight Aware and Plane Finder.

When an Icelandic volcano erupted in 2010, thousands of flights were grounded and four million people traveled there. “That was definitely our first foray into international events, and how displaying air traffic to the public in real-time could influence how people were thinking about world news,” says Petchenik. The fact that there was only a hole to be seen was our saving grace because the volume of visitors we received would have caused the website to crash.

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