Notes

Flightradar24 – Live Aircraft Traffic At All Times

Wondering how you stumbled across this? You have probably searched for flight traffic. Or anything related to flights. Well, you have stumbled across a gem, because this tool here avoids flight crashes and in the unfortunate situation that one does occur, it tells you how it happened.
Flightradar24 is a Swedish private internet-based service that displays air craft traffic on a map, in real time. It also shows flight tracks, origins, destinations, flight numbers, types of aircrafts, altitudes at which they are flying, speeds, etc. It also calculates the time lapse between the current flight tracks and historical data classified by the airport, airline, area or even the air craft type.
How Flightradar24 came into existence
This service was developed by two Swedish aviation enthusiasts in 2006. The service gained popularity when international media used it to make the public understand the flight disruption due to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruptions.
It was then used to study high-profile airlines cases like the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, the shooting of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and the disappearance of the Indonesian AirAsia Flight 8501. Since then, this service has been greatly employed to monitor aircraft traffic and avoid such tragedies.
How Flightradar24 Tracks
The service uses information from the following three sources.
1. Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B)
A large number of ground based ADS-B receivers collect data from any aircraft, that has transponder within itself, flying over the local area. This information is fed into the internet in real time.
2. Multilateration (MLAT)
The second source of information is from MLAT. Multilateration is a surveillance technique that uses the difference between two stations to calculate the probable path of movement of each station in a hyperbolic curve. The stations in this case would be two aircrafts or airports. It requires at least four FLightradar24 receivers to calculate the position of an aircraft.
3. Data from the Federal Aviation Administration
This is used to show position data for most aircrafts from, in and to North American airspace. In contrast to the other data sources FAA data is delayed by 5minutes.
How to Use FlightRadar24
The service has been incorporated into many websites like https://flightradar.live/ which can also be accessed on a smartphone.
When a loved one is travelling to a distant place alone, you would want to make sure that they are safe. You can zoom in on the area from which the aircraft takes off to find it. Then all you have to do is click on the aircraft icon to get details about it, including the path of its journey! Stay safe always!