Aircraft tracker stats

Published on May 29, 2023

Most commercial and governmental aircraft use a system called ADS-B to transmit information like their location, speed, and altitude to help air traffic control keep the skies safe. Because this data is transmitted via radio, anyone with a receiver can listen to what is happening around them.

I have a receiver set up at home that I use to feed data to Flightradar24 and ADS-B Exchange. My setup is pretty basic, consisting of a receiver and small aerial attached to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The software side was straightforward thanks to this guide. I also installed the ADS-B Exchange feed client and wrote a small script to pull data out from it.

Tracker stats

	The tracker has seen 23,449 different aircraft conduct 2,356,199 flights, most frequently one Airbus A-319 (reg. G-EUOE) 2981 times.
	It has tracked 587 different aircraft models registered in 113 countries. In the battle between manufacturers, it has followed 1.37 times more Airbus than Boeing planes.
	The London Air Ambulances have been seen 3797 times, and the NPAS helicopters 5452 times.
	The tracker also captures information that some militaries have chosen to make publicly available. 1718 of the tracked aircraft come from 60 different countries' militaries and have completed 12644 flights. These flights include 387 Chinooks, 59 Apaches, and, although long out of service, 402 Spitfires.
	The FAA has a programme where aircraft owners can partially opt out of public tracking. The tracker has seen 4024 of these aircraft 43894 times. The most frequently hidden aircraft model is the Gulfstream 5.

Updates frequently, most recently at 2025-08-27 13:57:58 UTC. Total ADS-B messages: 9,156,602,129.