
Learn how to track aircraft flights using open source OSINT. This article will provide you with detailed instructions and useful tools for aviation monitoring.
Aviation news sites:
There is a photo in the article that clearly shows the registration of G-ZABH
A Google search during registration will turn up a lot, here we’ll focus on specific websites and what they have to offer.
https://www.jetphotos.com/ – includes user-uploaded photos of airplanes and all other types of aircraft. A search here identifies the aircraft with additional data. At the top we see a photo uploaded to the site and a few other photos below.
Click on the photo (not the text to the right of the photo) and you’ll see this information about the photo from the person who uploaded it. most importantly, pay attention to the date and place. Using these photos and others, you can track where a plane has been sighted over time.
Note that other plane spotting websites may have additional photos, so you’ll also want to Google the listing to find other sites with photos of the same aircraft.
https://www.planespotters.net/ is another great resource that often includes additional photos of the same aircraft.
This site presents airframe information that includes the history of the aircraft from production to various operators over time, as well as the various registration numbers assigned to the aircraft when it was used by each operator.
To find this, look under a specific photo and click where it says “Glider Info”.
І ви отримаєте дані, представлені на скріншотах нижче.
ADS-B websites such as Flight Radar 24 (https://www.flightradar24.com/) use ADS-B data to track aircraft. Again there are different websites with different ADS-B networks and unique data. So it’s a good idea to google registration to find these other sites. But using Flight Radar 24, we get the following information, which includes the current location of the aircraft and its movement for the previous 7 days. (Note direct links to jet photos from jetphotos.com)
The site only provides 7 days of flight history (you should try other sites to check if longer data is available at this time). You can pay a fee to get additional flight history.
If you need to keep track of the aircraft and create your own flight history, you can use Visual Ping (visualping.io) to monitor changes to the web page. For example, you can enter the URL of a specific Flight Radar page for an aircraft and set up daily or weekly update requests.
Below is an example where a web page URL is entered into Visual Ping to monitor changes in the flight history section.
Check out the advanced settings below to adjust how photos are cleaned (like clicking a pop-up button that might cover the screenshot). It is recommended to receive weekly updates and add a screenshot to the current Word document.
Apart from Google, X is also a useful resource for looking up registration numbers, where you can find a variety of data, including regular updates.