Live Flight Map
Track live flights around the world on an interactive 3D map. Watch real-time aircraft movement, routes, altitude, speed, and airport activity across every continent.
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Sample flight tracks — click any aircraft marker for details · Drag to rotate · Scroll to zoom
What is a live flight map?
A live flight map is an interactive visualization that displays aircraft positions in real time across the globe. Using ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) transponder data, each aircraft continuously broadcasts its GPS position, altitude, speed, and heading. These signals are picked up by a global network of ground receivers and fed into flight tracking platforms like FlightStatus.flights, allowing you to watch thousands of commercial flights moving simultaneously around the Earth.
How real-time flight tracking works
Modern commercial aircraft are equipped with ADS-B transponders that broadcast position updates every 0.5–2 seconds. A network of volunteer and commercial ADS-B receivers on the ground picks up these signals and forwards them to aggregation servers. Flight tracking services decode this data to display aircraft positions on a map with sub-minute latency. Information such as flight number, aircraft type, origin, destination, altitude, and ground speed is cross-referenced with airline schedule databases to provide a complete picture of each flight.
Track aircraft, airports, arrivals, departures, and delays
Beyond the 3D globe view, FlightStatus.flights provides detailed per-airport pages with live arrivals, departures, and delay status. Each airport page includes real-time flight tables updated every 60–90 seconds using ADS-B data. For U.S. airports, FAA National Airspace System (NAS) data provides official delay advisories including Ground Delay Programs, Ground Stops, and Arrival/Departure Delay Advisories.
The flight detail page for any flight number shows the origin, destination, current altitude, speed, estimated arrival time, and any active delay. Use the search bar above to look up any flight by number (e.g. AA 100) or airport by IATA code (e.g. JFK).