Follow a Flight Live: Chase Cams, Telemetry and Ground Cameras
▸ Pick a plane, any plane
WorldEye's live flight tracker draws a few thousand commercial aircraft at any moment (plus private, business and military traffic) from public ADS-B broadcasts — the position, altitude, speed and heading signals aircraft transmit openly. Click one and you get its identity and route where the data provides it: callsign, aircraft type, origin and destination, progress along the route. The 'follow' button is where it gets fun.
Following offers three camera modes. Chase sits behind the aircraft, Forward looks along its heading, and Orbit slowly circles it. All three are driven by the same position stream as the map markers — there's no second, secret feed — so what you see is the tracker's best current picture of where that plane is.
▸ The honest part: it says 'interpolated' on the screen
ADS-B positions arrive in bursts, not a continuous stream. Between fixes, the follow camera moves the aircraft along its last known velocity — interpolation — and if fixes stop, it briefly extrapolates and then declares signal lost rather than inventing a position forever. The follow view labels itself permanently: 'TELEMETRY VIEW — NOT AN ONBOARD CAMERA · POSITION INTERPOLATED BETWEEN FIXES', with a live fix-age counter so you can see exactly how stale the picture is. If a fix is old, the screen tells you before you'd think to ask.
That label is the whole design philosophy in one line: a visualization of real data, labeled as a visualization. The plane you're watching is real; the camera is a reconstruction.
▸ Then look down: cameras near the aircraft
The popup's 'cameras near this aircraft' section lists real public cameras around the plane's ground position — airport-area feeds, highway cameras under the flight path, city cameras in the overflown town — and opens them in the normal viewer. It's the closest thing to looking out the window in reverse: not the plane's view of the ground, but the ground's view of the sky the plane is crossing. (Printed honestly in the panel: the aircraft itself won't be visible in those feeds.)
The same trick works from a traffic jam: clicking a congested road offers the nearest real cameras there too. Different layers, one idea — every visualization on the globe is one click from a real camera that can confirm it.
▸ Watching the edges: launches and satellites
Aircraft aren't the only things worth following off the [map](/). The space layer tracks upcoming launches with live countdowns (data from Launch Library 2) — follow a launch card and you'll get its pad, mission and a reconstructed ascent replay afterward, bannered as a reconstruction rather than telemetry. Satellite dialogs show live orbital position for thousands of tracked objects. Our flight tracking guide and plane spotting guide go deeper on reading all of it.
▸ Frequently asked questions
Why did the plane I was following freeze?+
Coverage gaps are real: ADS-B depends on ground receivers, so oceanic, polar and some rural tracks thin out. The follow view shows fix age live and releases the aircraft after a grace period instead of fabricating movement.
Is flight following a Pro feature?+
No. The flight layer, aircraft popups and follow cameras are free, like the rest of the live map. Pro covers the intelligence toolkit, satellite map view and recording features.
Can I see the plane in the ground cameras?+
Almost certainly not — public webcams point at roads and places, not the sky, and the panel says so. What you get is the world directly underneath the flight, live.
Try it live on the map.
Everything in this guide runs on WorldEye — the free 3D globe with flights, cameras, satellites, and natural hazards. No signup.