Spy plane tracker

Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft often fly long racetrack orbits near areas of interest, and many broadcast ADS-B while they do it. Wingwait's Mil mode puts them on one worldwide map.

What you can see

• RC-135 (Rivet Joint, Combat Sent, Cobra Ball): signals intelligence, including RAF Airseeker aircraft.
• RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-4C Triton: high-altitude drones, often with FORTE callsigns.
• P-8 Poseidon: maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft.
• E-3 Sentry and E-7 Wedgetail: airborne early warning (AWACS), including NATO aircraft.
• MQ-9 Reaper / Protector: when their transponders are on.

Built for analysis

Select an aircraft and the Military intel panel shows its role, its country of registration (from the ICAO address block), a decoded callsign where known, the squawk meaning, and whether it's flying a racetrack orbit. Wingwait detects orbits from the aircraft's own recent positions. The role chips and hotspot buttons (Black Sea, Baltic, Eastern Med, Gulf and more) jump straight to the action.

Limits (read these)

Everything here is public broadcast data. Many military flights broadcast nothing at all, so an empty map proves nothing. Positions can be seconds to a minute old, and some are derived by multilateration (MLAT) with lower accuracy. Wingwait shows the source and accuracy for every aircraft.

Questions