How is the data coverage compared to flightradar?

Last time I looked closely it was similar in North America and Europe. Asia, Africa, and over the oceans had some pretty big gaps.

There's also no delay on the data, although I think Flightradar and Flightaware dropped the 5 minute delay they used to have. Flightradar censors a lot of corporate jets and military/law enforcement aircraft but I don't think Opensky does. In fact one of either Opensky or adsbexchange even has a special flag in their REST API for "interesting" aircraft

> Flightradar censors a lot of corporate jets and military/law enforcement aircraft

Yes, this is disappointing. In the past I had seen military planes on there. I even saw fighters practising dogfighting over the North Sea. But more recently I've seen interesting aircraft fly over, such as large four-engine planes at altitude outside of normal commercial flight paths, but they just don't appear on flightradar. It's stupid because I can see the damn thing. I need to figure out an alternative to flightradar, it seems.

Some activists were using this kind of service to track dictator's flights to track stolen money [1]. If said dictator's can block their aircraft, the misappropriated funds would be easier to sneak out of the country.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700445

ADS-B Exchange [0] has a tag for military aircraft, right now it's showing a whole bunch of military aircraft (German, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, UK, US) over central Europe.

[0] https://global.adsbexchange.com/VirtualRadar/desktop.html

Note that even the Swedish spy plane is using Ads-b while flying along the baltic International border zone taunting Russia but the migs answering the taunt is not. Also flying dangerously close to the spy plane (10 m reported once). However the US spy planes are also mostly flying with the transponder on there.

Cool, that looks much better, thanks.

Using their UI, I can't seem to find the "interesting aircraft" tag. Here's what I see:

  * No data
  * No ADS-B Emitter Category Information
  * Light (<15500 lbs)
  * Small (15500 to 75000 lbs)
  * Large (75500 to 300000 lbs)
  * High Vortex Large (aircraft such as B-757
  * Heavy (> 300000 lbs)
  * High Performance (> 5g acceleration and 400 kts)
  * Rotorcraft
  * Glider / sailplane
  * Lighter-than-air
  * Parachutist / Skydiver
  * Ultralight / hang-glider / paraglider
  * Reserved
  * Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
  * Space / Trans-atmospheric vehicle
  * Surface Vehicle – Emergency Vehicle
  * Surface Vehicle – Service Vehicle
  * Point Obstacle (includes tethered balloons)
  * Cluster Obstacle
  * Line Obstacle

Yeah that was actually with adsbexchange (https://www.adsbexchange.com/currently-airborne-interesting-...).

That's really interesting, there are two Project Balloons high over the Brasilian Amazon.

The delay was a rule from the FAA for radar data provided by them, ADS-B plots have always been real-time. I am guessing (from the lack of orange icons anymore) that the ADS-B coverage is good enough now that FR24 is not using FAA feeds any more.

> I think Flightradar and Flightaware dropped the 5 minute delay they used to have

I was using Flightradar yesterday and visually tracking planes, seems like about a 10 second delay.