Flight Patterns of the World

Flight Patterns is a collection of maps which visualize the landing and take-off flight paths of major airports all around the world. Select one of the 37 major airports from the Flight Patterns global map and you can view a close-up map showing the in-bound and out-bound flight paths taken by aircraft at the chosen airport.

The colors of the flight paths shown on the close-up maps of each airport show the continent of origin / destination of each flight. You can change the colors to show the flight paths for take-off and the flight paths for landings. The data for all these flight pattern maps comes from ADSBexchange.


Flight paths over London

If you want to view the flight patterns for airports not featured on the Flight Patterns map then you can use Plane Finder's Global Coverage Map. The real-time flight tracking application Plane Finder allows you to follow the real-time location of planes around the world on an interactive map. Plane Finder uses data from a network of ADS-B receivers around the world to map the flights of plane in real-time. The Global Coverage Map uses a week of this data (15th-21st March 2019) to reveal the flight paths taken by planes around the world. One week's worth of data has been merged together and compiled to make a single interactive map.

In London you can clearly see the two main flight paths taken by planes as they approach Heathrow's two different runways. West of Heathrow planes quickly fan out after take-off depending on their destinations. In the east you can see the single flight path taken by planes as they approach and leave London City Airport and its single runway.