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 18,400 different aircraft conduct 1,113,524 flights, most frequently one Airbus A-319 (reg. G-DBCB) 1599 times.
	It has tracked 513 different aircraft models registered in 110 countries. In the battle between manufacturers, it has followed 1.29 times more Airbus than Boeing planes.
	The two London Air Ambulances have been seen 2013 times, and the four Met Police helicopters 2442 times.
	The tracker also captures information that some militaries have chosen to make publicly available. 1197 of the tracked aircraft come from 54 different countries' militaries and have completed 6369 flights. These flights include 185 Chinooks, 38 Apaches, and, although long out of service, 20 Spitfires.
	The FAA has a programme where aircraft owners can partially opt out of public tracking. The tracker has seen 2836 of these aircraft 22411 times. The most frequently hidden aircraft model is the Gulfstream 5.

Updates frequently, most recently at 2024-04-28 14:22:07 UTC. Total ADS-B messages: 4,703,057,867.