Above Us Only Planes: The Story of Flightradar24
People often say that life doesn't stand still — and if you need proof, just look at the popular air traffic website Flightradar24.
At any time of day or night, something is always moving on Flightradar24, with little pictures of planes creeping like colorful ants across the map, taking people from place to place.
Who, you ask yourself, could be traveling from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Kuwait City, or from Reykjavík, Iceland, to Liège, Belgium, and why?
Flightradar doesn't tell you who or why — it's just there to show the planes moving across the sky in real time, 24 hours a day.
If it wasn't so interesting, it could almost put you to sleep.
As they fly, planes send a signal that includes their location and other information. Flightradar gives volunteers a receiver that reads this signal when a plane is near and sends the information to the website.
The site uses over 35,000 of these receivers, as well as other information such as satellite data, to follow more than 200,000 flights per day.
Flightradar began as a small project in Sweden, but the site now has more than 4 million visitors each day, and it is even used by the aviation industry itself.
You can even click on a plane's picture to see what time it's landing.
But on some days there are more visitors than others. In August 2022, when US politician Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, almost 3 million people followed at least a part of the flight as she traveled there from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
And the planes keep on moving, creeping across the map day and night.
