Are the live flight radar websites *actually* live?
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 21 Jul, 2023
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I have this iPad App that lets you monitor live flights feed. One of the great features is that you point your iPad to a contrail and it tells you the details of that specific flight. As you can see on the example below there is some delay of seconds, probably caused by the internet feeds of the different information sources
I would consider that live though.I have only tried this app in Europe, but there the responses seems to be accurate.
The flight tracker websites actually have an incentive to not be exactly correct, and they argue that this is for security.
The cynical mind would suggest it just gives them a bit of a cost saving when it comes to information polling, updates etc.
Generally they will be within five minutes or so and reasonably accurate on flight paths (around here they seem to be within a few hundred feet)
- I work for a foreign government. Can I travel to the USA on an A-2 visa?
- Using library in Frankfurt as a short-term visitor
There’s a service called Flightradar24, and they have this to say in the description:
In addition to ADS-B data, we also get data from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the United States. This data is based on radar data and includes all commercial air traffic in US and Canadian air space (i.e. not just planes with ADS-B transponders). Unlike the ADS-B data that is presented real-time, the FAA data is delayed by roughly 5 minutes due to FAA regulations.
ADS-B stands for Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, a GPS-based surveillance system that broadcasts a signal with plane’s position in real time and can be intercepted by anyone with the necessary equipment.
From the PlaneFinder FAQ, they use the same ADS-B information that FlightRadar does, and I imagine every similar service under the sun.
I assume the FAA is the only source of flight information in US and Canada, so similar applications would use the same database, and with the same delay.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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