What PlaneTrack collects, live
Every position on the map starts as a radio message heard by a receiver. This page is the running total: how much we have stored, how the last day and the last three months looked, and who is feeding it right now. Figures refresh on their own schedule (from every five minutes to nightly), never on demand, so looking never slows the map down.
Aircraft on the map, hour by hour
Sampled every five minutes by the platform watchdog. The daily rhythm you can see is the world waking up: Europe and the US East Coast push the count highest in the European afternoon.
Positions stored per day
One bar per day of parsed positions written to the archive. Dips are usually an upstream feed dropping out for a few hours; the network of independent feeders and the FAA schedule data keep the map alive through them.
The datasets behind the map
| Dataset | Rows | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Positions | - | Every parsed position report: aircraft, time, latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, heading. Partitioned by day; recent days on SSD, older on the archive. |
| Flight legs | - | Complete flights stitched from positions: origin, destination, times, distance. This is what powers routes, history and the on-time tables. |
| Schedules (live) | - | FAA SWIM flight plans and gate times for US airspace, the last seven days. |
| Schedules (archive) | - | Every scheduled leg since we switched the feed on, kept for punctuality history. |
| Punctuality rollup | - | Per-day, per-route on-time performance, accumulating forever. |
| Notable events | - | Emergencies, diversions, go-arounds, holds and rare sightings detected in the stream. |
| Aircraft registry | - | Airframes with registration, type and operator, merged from OpenSky and the FAA. |
| Special airframes | - | Government, military, historic and otherwise notable aircraft from plane-alert-db. |
Feeder stations
Independent receivers run by the community. Names are what each feeder chose to show. Feeders get Premium free while they feed.
| # | Station | Receiver | Today | Range | Since |
|---|
From antenna to map
receiver network (ADS-B + MLAT) FAA SWIM (schedules, US)
| |
v v
message broker -> aggregator -> snapshot -> live map + API
| |
v v
position archive (daily partitions) -> flight legs, punctuality, events, storiesThe same archive serves data extracts, the API and Time Travel. Read more in How It Works.