Airport Information – The Full Departures & Arrivals Board

Summary: The full Airport Information board – departures and arrivals up to 24 hours ahead, filterable, with the airport’s weather, frequencies, NOTAMs and runways alongside, plus finding a listed aircraft on the live map.

The airfield popup’s Movements section (see Airfields, Airbases & Heliports) only shows the next three hours and a handful of rows. The full Airport Information board is the same data in much greater depth – every movement over a longer window, searchable, with the airport itself laid out alongside it.

Opening the Board

There are two ways in:

• As its own page, at ukafg.co.uk/airport-information.
• From the map itself – click an airfield marker, open its Airport tab, and click Full board under the Movements section. This opens as a panel over the map rather than taking you to a new page, so your map’s zoom, layers and aircraft are exactly as you left them when you close it – important if you’re running the map inside the Squawker PC app, where navigating away would otherwise reload it.

Both require being logged in with UKAFG Maps membership – the same requirement as the live map itself.

Choosing an Airport and Time Window

The airport picker lists the UK’s major commercial airports alphabetically. If you opened the board from the map for an airfield that isn’t on that list, it’s added as its own entry so the picker always reflects what’s on screen.

Choose 3, 12, or 24 hours ahead – all three come from the same data, so the board simply shows more or less of it.

Filtering

The filter box searches flight number, callsign, airline, aircraft type, registration, and destination/origin at once. As with the Live Flights search, separate several terms with a comma, “and”, or “+” to match any of them together – for example “ryanair, dublin” finds every Ryanair flight and everything to or from Dublin in one go.

Including Private and Light Aircraft

Private and light aircraft are always fetched, but hidden by default – tick Private flights to include them.

What Each Row Shows

• The scheduled time, with a revised time shown alongside if it’s changed.
• Flight number and airline, with the ATC callsign underneath once the aircraft is actually being tracked (useful since that’s what you’ll hear on frequency, not the flight number).
• Cargo and Private tags, where they apply.
• Destination or origin, with terminal, gate, check-in desk, baggage belt and runway shown wherever that airport publishes them.
• Aircraft type and registration, once known.
• Status, plus the actual time it left or reached the runway, once real – separate from the scheduled/gate times shown elsewhere in the row.

Finding an Aircraft on the Map (“On Map”)

Once a tracked flight is close enough to its departure or arrival, its row gets an On Map button – for arrivals that’s from 45 minutes before landing to 15 minutes after, and for departures from take-off to 45 minutes after. Outside that window the button doesn’t appear at all, since a flight still sitting at the gate or long since landed is very unlikely to be anywhere near the map’s coverage yet.

• From the panel over the map, clicking it switches Live Flights on automatically if it was off, waits for the aircraft to appear, then closes the board so you can see it.
• From the standalone Airport Information page, clicking it opens the interactive map and finds the aircraft there once it loads.

If Live Flights is set to Military Only, a civil aircraft is hidden. Instead of just saying so, the board offers a Show all aircraft and go to it button: one click switches Live Flights to All Aircraft and then finds the aircraft. The same button appears on the map when you arrive from the standalone page. Military Only is only switched off when you press it, and you can turn it back on in the Live Flights panel at any time.

The map covers near Europe as well as the UK, so a flight still over the Channel, France or the Low Countries is found and shown there too: if your map is showing only the UK, it briefly switches to the wider area to find it.

If the flight is genuinely too far out to be on the map yet – for example still well out over the Atlantic, or not yet climbed into range after take-off – clicking On Map tells you roughly where it actually is instead of failing silently, for example “VIR301 is 139 NM east of Heathrow at FL380, about 21 min out”. If it still can’t be found at all, it simply isn’t being received right now – it may be on the ground somewhere without coverage, or out of range.

The Airport Details Panel

Alongside the movements themselves, the board shows:

• The airport’s full name, town, and links to its own website and Wikipedia page, where known.
• Current weather and the likely runway in use, worked out the same way as the map popup’s estimate.
• Current NOTAMs for that airport.
• Its radio frequencies.
• Runway details and elevation.
• First and last light for the day.