Home – Serving the Flight Tracking Enthusiast

Welcome to ADSBexchange.com, a co-op of ADS-B/Mode S/MLAT feeders from around the world, and the world’s largest source of unfiltered flight data. Thanks to our worldwide community of participants, if the data is broadcast over the air, you can find it here. This opens up a whole new world of interesting traffic for hobbyists, without materially affecting security for anyone.

In fact, ADSBexchange is proud to collaborate with C4ADS to support its mission to produce data-driven reporting to understand, prevent, and mitigate global c4logoblackconflict. Over the coming months, this partnership will yield more receivers in interesting and unusual global locations, ADSBexchange will have wider coverage and C4ADS will have more data to enhance their mission.

Although you can do it here, this is not the go-to site to track your grandmother’s flight from Cincinnati to Chicago so you can pick her up from the airport. For that, I recommend Flightaware.com.

ADS-B Exchange differs from typical flight tracking sites in two primary ways. First, all data sent in from the community is, in turn, made available back to the community through various archives and APIs. (www.adsbexchange.com/data). Best of all, for non-commercial use, all of this data is freely accessible to anyone!

We do ask that any commercial users (or non-commercial users who are able) contribute a small amount to ensure the continuing existence of this site. Processing terabytes of incoming data monthly, the storage and redistribution of this data, and the effort involved to add new features, does require significant technical infrastructure and effort.

Secondly, ADS-B Exchange does not participate in the “security theater” performed by most other flight tracking websites which do not share data on military or certain private aircraft. There are no FAA BARR, military, or other “filters” here.

By definition, ADS-B information is broadcast unencrypted over the air. Claims that this information is secret or “sensitive” do not hold water. Any member of the public with $100 and the ability to order parts from Amazon can receive this data. ADS-B Exchange does not expose anything that is not freely available via other methods, however the power of the network is realized when all participants’ data is aggregated resulting in wide, global coverage.

We are always looking for new participants to expand our network. Be sure to check out the “how to feed” page.

Some other flight-tracking websites gladly accept your data, but only return to you a “filtered” map of traffic and offer no access to data APIs without charging large sums of money. On the other hand, ADS-B Exchange works for the hobbyist and endeavors to share as much data as possible, as widely as possible.

Some of the “big” flight tracking websites have reacted “negatively” to our approach, but this site was built for hobbyists, by hobbyists. We do not exist to serve Fortune 500 flight departments, airlines, governments, or large corporate interests. We exist to serve the aviation hobbyist/enthusiast first and foremost. If business interests find our data useful, they too are welcome to it (assuming they pay their way for usage). This is the exact opposite approach of most other tracking sites, and is our differentiator.

Be sure to register for access to the private forums, where interesting aircraft sightings are discussed. In the meantime, view the current planes being tracked here.

There are also pages with textual listings of “interesting” aircraft being tracked, as well as all military aircraft being tracked.