A website that lets you track your flight is helpful for many reasons: stay up to date on your flight’s schedule, including delays and weather, see where you are in the air in real-time, and for some flight trackers, you can even find parking deals for when you arrive. You can also use an online flight tracker to trace another person’s flight or even to just view all the air traffic in your area or monitor a specific airport’s congestion. You can, of course, find a specific flight by its flight number, or you can perform a general search using the origin and destination airport, which is useful if you want to see all the flights moving in and out of those locations or if you don’t know the flight number. The results can be filtered in a number of ways: flight type, status, airline, departure day and time, arrival day and time, alliance, and even the specific aircraft. Once you’ve chosen a specific flight to follow, you’ll have access to a ton of information:

A progress bar indicating the time it will take to get from one gate to the next, including local times.The aircraft’s flight history.The filed, actual, and estimated flight path on a map.A detailed report of where the plane has been during its flight, including coordinates.The average time it takes a taxi to reach the airport.

You can sign up a friend for notifications so that they’ll get email alerts as the flight progresses. They’ll be alerted when the flight plan is filed when the flight departs and arrives, and if the flight is delayed, canceled, or diverted. The FlightAware airline tracker also details cancellations and flight delays. Flight cancellations are also portrayed visually on their MiseryMap. This plane tracker has a really cool real-time, live flight tracker, too, for every plane in the air. Scroll around the map to see all the planes moving right now, and select any of them for more information. FlightAware can be used from their desktop website or via the FlightAware mobile app. The information this site provides about your flight is straightforward and to the point. See the departure and arrival airport, time estimates, airport info (e.g., parking, delays, weather), and local services such as limos. Flightview Live is a large map that details where the plane is right now. On the map is the path the plane will follow and basic details about the trip, such as scheduled and estimated departure and arrival times, the aircraft type, and the plane’s altitude and speed. A unique feature that makes tracking flights really easy, is that you can forward your itineraries to a special email address to automatically have the flight details loaded into your account, ready for you to track at any time. For this, you need to sign up for a free user account. There’s a mobile Flightview site you can access to use it from your phone, or you can install their mobile app. This free flight tracker lets you search for both commercial and general flight information. Just enter the flight number and airline, or the tail number for general aviation flights, and then the date of departure to learn more about the flight. You can also use this online flight tracker to find flights arriving at specific airports, for flights between two airports, airport delays, airport maps, route maps for selected airports, seat maps, model information for various aircraft, airline information, various flight-related statistics, and much more. FlightStats displays flight information beautifully, but there are several features that are missing and only available if you pay for them. For example, some online flight trackers provide departure and arrival information, flight alerts, and historical searches for free. FlightStats includes those features, and an ad-free experience, only if you pay. Another way to find a specific flight instead of sifting through the map is to use the search box at the top of the site. Enter any flight number to instantly locate the plane on the map. In the map settings are some options you can customize, such as to change the map style, adjust the brightness, change the aircraft icon size, toggle on or off types of traffic like gliders and ground vehicles, and more. Several other features, flight details, and map options are available if you pay for Flightradar24, such as flight alerts, weather and other map labels, and full aircraft details. Here’s how they gather their data: Please know, however, that Google pulls this information from other flight tracker websites, some of which are listed above.