LIVE AVIATION
Live Plane Spotting, From Your Sofa
Plane spotters drive to airport fences for a reason — watching a heavy jet on final is genuinely thrilling. WorldEye brings the fence to you: thousands of live flights on one globe, real routes and altitudes, a chase camera that rides behind any aircraft, and real cameras at the fields themselves.
Pick a descending A380 over London, a freighter crossing the Pacific, or the next arrival into your home airport — and follow it all the way down. Free, with no account and no signup.
Ways to spot
Follow a flight in
Click any aircraft and start the follow camera — chase, forward or orbit views ride with it through descent and landing rollout, with live altitude, speed and fix age on the HUD.
Work the approach path
Zoom to a major airport at peak hour and the arrivals line up like beads on a string. Each popup shows the route, aircraft type and how far out it is.
See the actual aircraft
Flight panels show a real photo of the exact aircraft — the same tail number — credited to its photographer on Planespotters, alongside live altitude, speed and heading.
Check the airport itself
3,528 FAA weather cameras at 981 US airports plus airport webcams worldwide: see the field's weather and activity before you even look at the sky.
How to start spotting
Open the map, turn on flights
Enable Commercial Aviation on the WorldEye globe. Thousands of live aircraft appear, moving in real time.
Pick your plane
Click any aircraft for its callsign, route, altitude and speed — or zoom into an airport and watch arrivals stack up on approach.
Follow it down
Hit Follow and the camera rides with the aircraft in chase, forward or orbit view as it descends toward its destination.
A spotter’s session: how regulars use it
Airport-fence spotting runs on local knowledge: which runway is in use, when the heavies arrive, where the light is. The map version has its own version of that craft. Hubs work in banks — waves of arrivals and departures — and at the top of a bank the approach path into Atlanta, Heathrow or Haneda delivers a landing every minute or two. Pick the bank, not the airport: mid-morning and early evening at the big hubs are the reliable shows.
Cargo is the night shift’s reward. When the passenger banks sleep, the freighters move — Anchorage, Memphis, Louisville and Leipzig run some of the busiest night skies on the planet, and following a 747 freighter down through a dark continent is a different, quieter kind of spotting. And when the weather turns, the map gets dramatic: holding stacks building over a hub, diversions peeling off, a storm line rerouting a whole sky — the days aviation is most interesting are the days it isn’t routine.
Plane spotting FAQs
What is live plane spotting on WorldEye?
Instead of standing at a fence with binoculars, you watch live air traffic on a 3D globe: thousands of real flights (3,500+ aircraft on the map at a typical moment) drawn from live ADS-B data, each with its route, altitude, speed and heading. You can follow any of them with a chase camera and pull up a real photo of that exact aircraft. It is plane spotting as a map, not a video stream.
Can I actually watch planes land?
You watch the landing happen on the map: the aircraft's real descent profile, flown live, with the follow camera riding behind it to touchdown. Where a public airport camera exists near the field, you can open it too — WorldEye carries 3,528 FAA airport weather cameras at 981 US airports, plus airport webcams worldwide. Be clear about what those are: most are airfield weather views, and only some frame a ramp or runway — we show them as they are rather than promising a touchdown video at every airport.
Which flights can I follow?
Any aircraft on the map — commercial airliners, private jets, cargo and military traffic that broadcasts ADS-B. Click one to see its origin, destination, progress and a real photo of that exact aircraft, then follow it in chase, forward or orbit view.
How live is the data?
Positions refresh every 30 seconds from the live feed and are interpolated smoothly between fixes, so aircraft glide rather than jump. The follow HUD always shows the age of the last fix, and it labels itself honestly: a telemetry view, not an onboard camera.
What are the best airports to spot at?
On the map, the busiest approach paths — Atlanta, Chicago O'Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth, London Heathrow, Frankfurt, Tokyo Haneda, Dubai — give you a landing every minute or two at peak. Zoom to the final approach path, pick an aircraft on descent, and follow it in.
Is there a cost or account needed?
No. Flights, the follow camera and cameras are free with no account and no signup. Open the globe and start spotting.
Can I see military aircraft?
Only the ones broadcasting ADS-B publicly — some military traffic does (tankers, transports and training flights often appear), and much of it doesn't, by design. What you see is what the aircraft themselves are transmitting; WorldEye doesn't track anything that isn't broadcast.
Do helicopters show up?
Yes — rotorcraft get their own icon on the map so they stand out from fixed-wing traffic. Around cities you'll see news, police and medical helicopters working; along coasts and in the North Sea, the offshore energy traffic.
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Open the globe, turn on flights, and follow one down.
Go deeper: live flight tracker · what is ADS-B? · satellite tracker