Whether you want to know the flight status of your loved ones or if your next flight will be delayed; you have to know the art of how to track a flight. I will show you exactly how you can easily do that.
Flight Tracking Websites:
Flightradar24 With an average of 35 million visitors per month; it is definitely the most famous of all of the tracking websites and it’s one I personally use.
FlightAware With an average of 25 million visitors per month; FlightAware is definitely one of the popular options.
RadarBox With an average of 2 million visitors per month; and global coverage, it makes it a reliable website to use.
Adsbexchange Not so popular with the general public, but definitely the most interesting of them all. Adsbexchange is “the world’s largest co-op of ADS-B/Mode S/MLAT feeders, and the world’s largest public source of unfiltered flight data”.
Google This website don’t need an introduction at all, everyone knows it, everyone uses it, and no need to mention their visitors per month either!
Now, I will teach how to track a flight by only using one of the following:
- A Flight Number.
- The route.
- Other combinations.
I will use FlightRadar24.com as my main website for this.
How to Track A Flight? Using Only A Flight Number
This is the easiest the most forward of them all. You log in to flight radar and you type in your flight number in the search box, and you get to see all of the details about your desired flight.
How to Track A Flight? Knowing Only the route
This is easy using FlightAware.com, just open the website, and you will see that you can search either by flight number or by route. You type in the departure airport and the destination airport, and you click the search icon, you will be directed to another page where you will see all of the flights that did the same route the day before, and who are doing the same route at the time of searching and in the next day. It’s quite easy from there to guess which one you are looking for, especially if you know the airline.
Also; usually, there aren’t a lot of airlines doing the same route at the same time; so you will probably end up finding only one or two maximum.
How to Track A Flight? Other combinations
You can obviously search in different combinations. Say, for example; a friend of yours says he is arriving at around 18:00 to Stansted, and you already know he is on a holiday in Alicante. You can simply go to Stansted airport in flightradar24; press it and choose arrivals; scroll down to around 18:00 time, and see all the flights arriving at Stansted airport at that time. You can see that Raynair (FR8975) is arriving at around 18:25 from Alicante. This way you can decide when you should drive to the airport to pick him up.
How to know if your flight will be delayed?
Let’s use an example for this. See the picture below, it shows a Raynair flight (FR8133). The flight is from Gran Canaria to Stansted.
Let’s say you were in Gran Canaria waiting for your flight. The aircraft picking you up will come from one of the airline’s hubs. For Ryanair; it’s primarily Stansted Airport. What you can do is minus one from your actual flight number. Why? This way you will come up with a new flight number, if you type the new one in this search bar, you will see where “Your aircraft” is, and you would be able to see if it’s on time to not.
In our example, it would be (FR8133 – 1 = FR8132). FR8132 is the flight number of the flight from Stansted to Gran Canaria. It was on time!
Last Words:
There is more you can do with flight tracking websites that I haven’t mentioned. More to come in another article and on my Youtube Channel.
