Sites That Let You Track Aircraft Overhead And Ships At Sea In Realtime

These are some interesting sites I came across.
The first site is a live radar site of all the aircraft currently in the air around the world.
It allows you to isolate any of the aircraft and gives you its identification, destination, airspeed and point of origin.
I've used this in the past to see a plane approaching my home overhead and was able to go outside and be in position to observe it before it was visible or heard.
The exception to all this is military craft.
They will sometimes give some info about the aircraft but often just an icon on the map is all you get.
Check it out sometime.

Flight Radar

The next two sites are for ships at sea.
I won't go into detail for these.
It is basically similar to the aircraft sites in regard to functionality.

Here are the marine sites:

Marine Traffic Global

and

Ship Location map

I guess these are useful in tracking how far from port your mother-in-laws cruise ship may be.

They are interesting sites.

I remember watching flight Radar (or something similar) when the Turkish coup attempt was happening, All the planes were circling the airports because none of them had permission to land and airports had been seized, Pretty cool stuff.

a reply to: Errollorre

That was cool, thank you. I tracked a Delta flight right over my house and it was dead on.

Used marine traffic to find offshore drill rigs when I worked in oil & gas.

Its always struck me as odd to allow such mass surveillance to the public. But this is nothing compared to the tracking of every cellphone GPS and laptop. The latter however is not so available to the public.

If you download the FR24 app to your phone, it has a real time ability. It uses the camera on your phone, and can "see" out to something like 250 km. It comes in handy.

For the Web there is also flightaware, and planefinder, as well as a few others.

Wow, that be a lot of planes.

a reply to: nOraKat

The US, when looking at scheduled passenger, business, and general aviation flights, averages somewhere around 87,000 flights a day. Worldwide, in 2014, there were an average over over 102,000 scheduled commercial flights operating every day.

The marine traffic data is compiled from a piece of equipment called AIS (Automatic Identification System). Its carriage and operation is mandatory for all commercial vessels over 300 gross tonnes. None of the information is in any way restricted and can be decoded by anyone with a freely available receiver. The sites like marine traffic simply combine that data with Google maps and usually a user maintained ship photos database.

The data broadcast falls into three broad categories. Static, dynamic or voyage data. Static data is programmed when the unit is commissioned and can't be adjusted on board. That includes things like call sign, name, vessel dimensions etc. Dynamic data is real time data from on board sensors: GPS position, speed, course, rate of turn etc. Voyage data is user input and typically is changed after each port visit. This includes destination, eta, cargo type and crew numbers.

The IMO (International Maritime Organisation) has condemned the publication of this data online as being potential tally damaging to security but there is no way to prevent it. The system just does not allow it.

Military vessels do carry AIS units but will typically either display with no data (no name, call sign etc) when not on operations or will go dark and merely receive when operational.

There were plans kicking around a few years back to put receivers on geostationary satellites so you could track vessels in the open ocean. Don't think it ever paid off so you will usually lose a vessel once it gets about 30 miles away from land.

As a navigator it is a very useful system. Have a look at the traffic density in the English channel or the Singapore straits. Always enjoyed taking the big tankers through those.

a reply to: Errollorre

I use Marine Traffic for work regularly. Everyone wants to know when their container will land.

www.shipfinder.co

here's another. time delay I think.

fascinating stuff. would loved to have seen the planefinder on 9/11.

most mil stuff won't show

a reply to: ElGoobero

Most won't, but some very interesting ones have. Mercury shows up more often than not, and both an E-3 and RC-135 have been seen flying missions near Libya in recent years.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

I always find it frustratingly useless. I want to see the things that count for good situational awareness. For instance when the police aircraft are in town I want to know, but the Cessna and Astar that they occasionally bring in from a neighboring city when something big is going down never shows up on the map. Also whenever military craft come through (which is almost never) I want to know if something is going on in this area but they never show up either.

a reply to: CraftBuilder

Uh, not sure what you mean, the site I said I use tracks marine ships, not aircraft.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
If you download the FR24 app to your phone, it has a real time ability. It uses the camera on your phone, and can "see" out to something like 250 km. It comes in handy.

For the Web there is also flightaware, and planefinder, as well as a few others.

I use Flightradar24 also to see what my Sky Camera got each night doing this since 2013



files.abovetopsecret.com...

On a good night of a meteor storm
Stack picture from one night also produce a 100 to 120 Mb video avi files for each


Ground map lay-out

files.abovetopsecret.com...


files.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

I somehow managed to reply to one of your posts instead of to the thread in general.

a reply to: ElGoobero

Some military stuff shows up. If you take a look around Syria/Iraq you'll see US/UK/Aussie tankers operating most nights.

You can also occasionally find a maritime patrol aircraft that have great spiderweb-like routes presumably as they are tracking a sub

a reply to: Errollorre

Not much traffic over Greenland, Antarctica or much of Russia for that matter.

originally posted by: CraftBuilder
I somehow managed to reply to one of your posts instead of to the thread in general.

No worries.

I thought I might as well add some other sites I'm aware of.

This site tracks the location of the I.S.S.

I.S.S. Tracker

Then again you could just go to the N.A.S.A. site and see tons of space station stuff.
Like this live view from out of the I.S.S. window towards Earth.

View From The Space Station

And if you're interested in what they are trying not to collide with here is a site that shows you the location of satellites in Earth's orbit.

Satellite Tracker