Tracking Aircraft

[WW3hasstarted]

i know Elon Musk has been tracked a lot in news etc 

here is Footballer Messi in plane he owns live now https://www.flightradar24.com/LVIRQ/2eba3c1c

[SectorVector]

I thought the flight path would go forward, then backward a few times, then turn left, then suddenly turn right, and forward again. But No :-(

Anyway, more interesting is the story of FlightRadar24.

Here is one an article from CNN from 2022.
Inside Flightradar24, the website that tracks every plane in the sky

On an average day, more than 200,000 flights take off and land across the world. That includes commercial, cargo and charter planes -- which account for about half of the total -- as well as business jets, private aircraft, helicopters, air ambulances, government and military aircraft, drones, hot air balloons and gliders.

Most of them are equipped with a transponder, a device that communicates the aircraft's position and other flight data to air traffic control, and that signal can be captured with inexpensive receivers based on a technology called ADS-B, for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. That's what flight-tracking websites do in a nutshell, providing users with a real-time snapshot of everything that's in the sky (minus a few exceptions).

...
How data is harvested
To gather the data, Flightradar has built its own network of ADS-B receivers, which they now say is the largest in the world at about 34,000 units, covering even remote areas like Antarctica.
...
The website, part of a group of popular flight-tracking services along with FlightAware and Plane Finder, was founded in Sweden in 2006 "completely by accident," says FlightRadar24's director of communications, Ian Petchenik, as a way to drive traffic to a flight price comparison service.
...
Aircraft owners or operators can also decide to prevent their data from being publicly displayed, most commonly for military, government or private planes. For example, they can sign up to a program such as LADD, for "Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed," which is maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration: "We abide by that list," says Petchenik.

[WW3hasstarted]

I thought the flight path would go forward, then backward a few times, then turn left, then suddenly turn right, and forward again. But No :-(

Anyway, more interesting is the story of FlightRadar24.

Here is one an article from CNN from 2022.
Inside Flightradar24, the website that tracks every plane in the sky

On an average day, more than 200,000 flights take off and land across the world. That includes commercial, cargo and charter planes -- which account for about half of the total -- as well as business jets, private aircraft, helicopters, air ambulances, government and military aircraft, drones, hot air balloons and gliders.

Most of them are equipped with a transponder, a device that communicates the aircraft's position and other flight data to air traffic control, and that signal can be captured with inexpensive receivers based on a technology called ADS-B, for Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. That's what flight-tracking websites do in a nutshell, providing users with a real-time snapshot of everything that's in the sky (minus a few exceptions).

...
How data is harvested
To gather the data, Flightradar has built its own network of ADS-B receivers, which they now say is the largest in the world at about 34,000 units, covering even remote areas like Antarctica.
...
The website, part of a group of popular flight-tracking services along with FlightAware and Plane Finder, was founded in Sweden in 2006 "completely by accident," says FlightRadar24's director of communications, Ian Petchenik, as a way to drive traffic to a flight price comparison service.
...
Aircraft owners or operators can also decide to prevent their data from being publicly displayed, most commonly for military, government or private planes. For example, they can sign up to a program such as LADD, for "Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed," which is maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration: "We abide by that list," says Petchenik.

lol re zig zagging plane very clever : )   yes Flightradar is very good as is https://globe.adsbexchange.com/   which shows Military aircraft too ! click the letter U at top right to only see the Military stuff they can track ( of course it doesnt show everything ) but it can show a lot