Live Flights – Watching Aircraft in Real Time

Summary: How to switch on live flight tracking, filter by altitude, follow an aircraft, and control labels and sound alerts.

Switch on Live Flights in the Layers panel to see real-time aircraft positions over the UK and near Europe, updated continuously. A live count badge on the layer shows how many aircraft are in the area being tracked.

All Aircraft vs. Military Only

The Mode switch at the top of the Live Flights section has two sides. The side that’s on is filled in solid colour, and the line underneath says what the map is showing. Click the other side to switch, or click the side that’s on to turn Live Flights off:

• All Aircraft — every tracked aircraft in range.
• Military Only — filters the map down to military traffic (see the separate article on Military Flight Filters & the Activity Board for what’s available in this mode).

Filtering by Altitude

Use the altitude-band buttons to show or hide aircraft by height band: GND (on the ground), Low (1,000–10,000 ft), Mid (FL100–FL250), and High (FL250+). Combine bands to focus on, say, just low-level traffic near an airfield.

Following an Aircraft

Click any aircraft icon to select it, then choose Track to keep the map centred on it as it moves — handy for following a single flight without manually panning. Click Track again, or select a different aircraft, to stop.

Coverage: the UK and Near Europe

Live Flights covers a circle roughly 500 nautical miles across the UK: Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, southern Norway and the Faroes are inside it, while Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Bordeaux and Oslo are just outside.

• While the map shows only the UK and Ireland, it gets UK traffic and updates about every second.
• Zoom out or pan beyond that, and it switches to the whole coverage area. With All Aircraft that is a much bigger list, so it updates every 5 seconds instead; Military Only stays fast either way. Zoom back into the UK and it switches back.
• Only aircraft in the part of the map on your screen are drawn, which keeps the map quick with thousands of aircraft being tracked.

Some features stay focused on the UK: frequency predictions stop outside UK airspace (see Reading the Aircraft Info Panel), push notifications only cover the UK area, and the flight history keeps civil traffic for the UK area only (see Replaying Past Flight Traffic).

The Aircraft Table

The table button in the button stack on the right of the map opens a sortable list of the aircraft in view along the bottom of the map. Its Auto Select button keeps the information panel on whichever aircraft is closest to you – see The Aircraft Table.

Labels and Sound

• Labels show each aircraft’s data block (callsign, type, flight level and squawk) directly on the map, so you don’t need to click every icon to identify what you’re looking at. The chip is a setting: switched on, it stays on however far you zoom out, and the labels appear from zoom level 8 and closer, where there is room to read them; switch it on while zoomed further out and a note says to zoom in. You choose what the block shows, over how many lines, and whether it sits above or below the aircraft: see Customising the Aircraft Data Block. It is remembered with your other map settings.
• Equipment shows the ground equipment the feed lists among the aircraft: tower transponders, airport vehicles and fixed obstacles. It is off by default. The chip shows how many there are, and the All Aircraft count never includes them; with the chip on, the status line says so, for example 452 aircraft + 15 equipment.
• Audio alerts play a distinct tone for emergency squawks and for zone alerts (see the separate articles on those features), even if the map tab isn’t in focus.

For details on what’s shown when you click an individual aircraft, see Reading the Aircraft Info Panel. For notifications when the map isn’t open, see the Alerts & Notifications category.

Aircraft Flying in Formation, Heard but Not Placed

Some military aircraft are heard by the receiver networks but not placed, because they are not sending a position. When one of those is flying with a formation mate that is on the map, with the same callsign and a different number (KING33 with KING31 and KING32), the map draws it as a green dashed ring beside that mate. Hovering it says with KING32, its panel says it is not placed itself but flying with KING32, and it moves with the mate on every update. Because the mate’s position is real, it gets a frequency prediction like any placed aircraft. Other unplaced aircraft stay off the map, since a rough area is not a position; they are listed on the Live Military Board.

The Live Military Board

The shield button in the button stack on the right of the map opens a board of every military aircraft airborne now, in the style of the airport boards: who it is, where it is from, what it is doing in words, and the frequency it is likely working. It also opens from the Full board link at the top of the Military Only panel, and as its own page at /map/?milboard=1. See The Live Military Board.