ADS-B Exchange operates a bit differently from other flight tracking sites. As a group of aviation enthusiasts, our primary goal is to answer the question of “what’s up there” rather than “is grandma’s flight on-time”.
- You’ll never see an aircraft censored or “blocked” from our site. If one of our feeders is receiving it, the data will be there. This includes military, and other aircraft that attempt to be “unlisted”.
- Hint: to see some of the planes not shown by other sites, from the map page, right-hand column, Filters -> LADD -> Filter. This primarily applies to US registered aircraft.
- We don’t “estimate” or “interpolate” positions. Every time you see an aircraft move on ADS-B Exchange it is based on actual data received and not an estimate of where the aircraft “should” be. Look at the unnatural movement of aircraft on some of the other sites – you’ll see what we mean. If we are receiving the data, we’ll update positions as often as once per second… with _real_ data. (2x per second via the Enterprise API).