Looking to the sky reveals much about what’s happening on the ground
Perhaps you should spend a little more time on Flightradar24. Here’s what you might learn...
Every few days or so, I will take a break from work and catch up on the world’s skies. Rather than train my eyes upward, I’ll open Flightradar24, a popular service for tracking anything that humans put into the air. The site is used by everyone from journalists monitoring the airborne movements of deposed potentates to deskbound workers looking for a connection to the outside world. It relies largely on Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), a satellite-based technology that provides faster, more accurate speed and location data than radar.
The more you look, the more you will begin to see. While scanning Shasta Lake in California, I saw a curious cluster of helicopters. “Power line inspections,” says Ian Petchenik, Flightradar24’s director of communications. “Any time you see a big cut in the forest it’s power lines.”
There is lots to discover in the sky, if you know where – and how – to look. “I’ve been doing this for more than a decade now,” says Petchenik, “and I’ve learned so much about the world just by clicking on a random thing on the map and being like, ‘What’s that?’”
In my time looking screenward and upward, here are a few things that have caught my eye:
1.
The jet stream. One of the site’s most striking patterns is the prominent flow of aircraft between the US and Europe, a big arcing band with its apex near Greenland. Those flights are following the North Atlantic Tracks, a kind of highway in the sky that helps organise things when transatlantic flights slip out of the watchful eye of air-traffic control radar. The tracks are modified twice per day (by Canada’s Gander Control Center and Ireland’s Shanwick Control Center) to make optimal use of the jet stream – that atmospheric current blowing from west to east. The stream is stronger at night, which is one reason why so many Europe-bound US flights are red-eyes.
2.
The most tracked. The pop charts of Flightradar24. Military flights tend to do well, as does anything big, such as the Airbus Beluga cargo plane or Antonov’s massive AN-225, when it was still in use. A plane that has declared an in-flight emergency, or a “Squawk”, gets clicks, as do celebrities of all stripes flying around in private jets. The most-tracked flight of all time was the one carrying the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II from Edinburgh to London in 2022.
3.
Supply chain survey. Zoom in on Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Alaska and you will see many more aircraft than you might expect. In terms of passengers, the airport is a minor player but looked at by another metric it is the third-busiest hub in the world. Aircraft carrying cargo from China to the US stop to refuel here, as it’s more efficient to stop than to fly nonstop with the added weight of fuel.
4.
The loneliest flights. Like a map of the human circulatory system,Flightradar24 clearly depicts the most vital arteries, with great thrombotic knots around crowded airspaces, such as New York. But then you will spot a seemingly wayward plane, wending a lonely path at the far reaches of the globe: a LATAM flight from Santiago to Auckland or a European cargo flight heading north from Antarctica’s Wolf’s Fang Runway. Many places used to be off limits to commercial aircraft but changes in aircraft technology and aviation rules now mean that aircraft such as Airbus A350 only need to be within 370 minutes’ flying time of a diversionary airport.
5.
The blank spots. On a map filled with aircraft what stands out are the voids. The large blank circle over Tibet reflects the mountainous Tibetan Plateau, an aviation challenge due to its height and isolation. Other no-go zones are geopolitical: Russia, with the largest airspace over land in the world, has been off limits to most Western countries since 2022. The airspaces over Iran and Ukraine tend to be empty as well.
But there are other kinds of blank spaces. Many military aircraft do not appear, either because the planes are not equipped with ADS-B or the technology is not turned on. And in response to complaints from private-jet owners, the US Federal Aviation Administration began limiting tracking for them. No longer can casual flight trackers watch Taylor Swift or Elon Musk jet across the globe.
But what breaktime flight-watchers like me can do is look to the skies to learn more about the comings and goings on the ground.
Tom Vanderbilt is a journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
