How to track emergency flights live

Emergencies are rare for any one flight and happen somewhere every day. When one does, the first public sign is often a four-digit code on a flight tracker, long before any news report.

What the emergency codes mean

Every airliner's transponder sends a four-digit code, the squawk, that air traffic control assigns. Three codes are reserved for trouble, and most trackers make them stand out:

A crew does not need the code to declare an emergency: they can say so on the radio. Setting 7700 alerts every controller whose radar sees the aircraft. More on each code in what does squawk 7700 mean.

Ways to follow them live

Each has its blind spots. They can only show what their receivers hear, so an emergency over an ocean or a remote region may not appear until the aircraft comes back into range.

How many emergencies there are

Flightradar24 looked at its own data from late 2022 to early 2024: on average 36 flights a week squawked 7700, never fewer than 19 and at most 67, and the busiest single day had 18. AirNav Radar has put it at 5 to 7 flights a day out of about 80,000: about 60% for technical reasons, 20% medical and 20% radio failures.

FlyScout's own count for 18 September to 16 October 2026 was 155 emergency codes: 120 of 7700, 31 of 7600 and 4 of 7500. Almost all were in Europe and North America, where the receiver networks are densest.

What a 7700 does and does not tell you

A squawk says that something needs attention, not what. Flightradar24 puts it plainly: 7700 means a problem that needs immediate attention, not necessarily immediate danger. Many are passengers taken ill or faults the crew wants on the ground quickly, and end in an ordinary landing.

It is also not complete. Some crews declare an emergency by radio without changing the code, and some serious incidents never show 7700 at all.

How FlyScout follows emergencies

Every couple of minutes, FlyScout asks for the aircraft squawking 7700, 7600 or 7500 anywhere in the world. A code seen once is not yet a finding: it is published when the code is seen again, and while the aircraft is still in the air, FlyScout Pro shows it under Happening now, with where it is.

Then FlyScout keeps following the flight to its landing and compares where it landed with where it was going. Of the 155 aircraft above, at least 12 landed somewhere other than planned, and 9 more came back to the airport they had left. The finding keeps the emergency as its headline and adds the ending as a second line, in the same form as any diversion, such as "Diverted to Marseille · planned Carcassonne". It never guesses why.

You can see the last 48 hours of emergencies free. FlyScout Pro adds an alert for emergencies anywhere, or only near you, and 30 days of history.

A word on watching emergencies

Behind every 7700 are people having a difficult day: a crew working through a checklist, a passenger who is ill. Watching how it ends can be fascinating, and it is part of why trackers exist. But the code does not tell you what happened, and early guesses are often wrong. Wait for the landing, and for the airline or the investigators to explain.