How to find interesting flights on Flightradar24, and the faster way

Open Flightradar24 at any hour and the map is full: yellow aircraft over every continent, most of them doing exactly what they are supposed to. Somewhere among them, an airliner is circling in a hold for its fortieth minute, another has just gone around, and a tanker is drawing its tenth lap over the sea. Here is how to find them.

Start with what everyone is watching

Flightradar24's list of the most-tracked flights is the quickest way into whatever is happening right now. Flights squawking an emergency code rise to the top of it, along with whatever is in the news.

Look for red

Aircraft are normally yellow on Flightradar24. One turns red when you select it, or when it squawks 7600, radio failure, or 7700, a general emergency, and the app can notify you when that happens. Flightradar24 is careful to add that a red icon does not necessarily mean immediate danger. See what does squawk 7700 mean.

Use filters

Filters turn the haystack into a short list. Flightradar24's ready-made categories include passenger, cargo, military and government, and business jets, and its advanced filters, on a paid plan, match:

• Squawk codes, any four digits: 7700, or 7000 for light aircraft in Europe.
• Aircraft types, by ICAO type code, with a wildcard for a family: B77* for every Boeing 777.
• Callsigns, with wildcards: BAW1* for a range of British Airways flights.
• Airlines, either the one operating the flight or the one whose colours the aircraft wears.
• Registration, altitude, speed and aircraft age.

Rare types are a good use of type filters: an Antonov An-124 or a Boeing 747 freighter stands out at once. Very high or very low altitudes, or a speed range, pick out other oddities. As of October 2026, Flightradar24's Silver plan costs $2.99 a month and Gold $6.49, and both include advanced filters and more playback history than the free plan's seven days.

Learn the shapes

Most unusual flights are not marked as unusual anywhere. They show only in the shape of the track:

The trouble is time. A hold only looks like a hold after a lap or two; a go-around is over in a few minutes; a diversion is only clear when the aircraft lands somewhere else. Spotting them by eye means watching the map for hours, and still missing most of them.

What you will not find on Flightradar24

Flightradar24 blocks some aircraft: some military and government aircraft for security reasons, Air Force One, and aircraft whose owners have asked through programmes such as the FAA's LADD. Others are shown anonymised. And when an aircraft flies out of range of its receivers, Flightradar24 may keep moving it along its expected route, drawn with a black dotted trail: an estimate, not a position. See why flight trackers lose planes.

The faster way

FlyScout does the watching. It looks at the world's flights around the clock and measures every track against fixed rules: a hold of 30 minutes or more, a go-around that stands out, circuits, a turnback, a diversion, an emergency code, a rapid descent, a tanker on station, a jet above 52,000 ft, a rare military type. What it finds goes into one feed, each flight said in plain words, "Long holding near Nantes", "Go-around at London Gatwick", with its track on a map you can replay.

The last 48 hours are free. FlyScout Pro adds alerts, the unusual flights still in the air as they happen, and 30 days of history. See FlyScout vs Flightradar24 for how the two fit together.