Why do I see so many planes flying over my house that are not on flightaware?

FlightAware General
1

At several times during the day there are planes that fly over my house that do not show up on the flightaware website. Are these all military aircraft? Can military jets fly anywhere they please with no tracking whatsoever?

2

They are tracked by regular ATC. They aren’t displayed by FA. Additionally, any private owner can request the FA block displaying their aircraft. Still tracked by ATC, but not displayed

3

Or they may not have an ADS-B transponder.

1 Like
4

Quite a few planes are tracked by FA but not shown on the live map.

Build your own feeder and the local map will show all flights with ADS-B:
PiAware - build your own ADS-B ground station for integration with FlightAware - FlightAware

You can also check if you can find them on one of the other tracking sites.

5

Great. Thanks guys. Appreciate the info.

6

Mode s and adsb will show on your own radar if you use the piaware image on a PI some military aircraft will use a military transponder which blocks them from public view

7

Not being show on Flightaware just means they are on one of the block lists maintained by FAA and EASA.

There are military encrypted transponders, that’s something you can’t receive locally.
See here: Aviation transponder interrogation modes - Wikipedia

8

I’ve noticed i see tons of military aircraft on ADS-B Exchange but on Flight Aware they don’t show up. How is it Flight Aware isn’t allowed to show military aircraft but the other website is?

9

Flightaware adheres to requests of owners and goverments in order to block the tracking of specific aircraft.
The other website is not blocking / filtering any traffic at all so they provide the most complete picture.
Military aircraft are also capable of switching of their decoders so if they don’t want to noticed they can do that as well.

10

Maybe not a question of “allowance” but more of what they want to do.

Beside that many other sites are also filtering military aircraft.
FA is not doing it all the time, sometimes you can track military as well (mainly C17 or C5)

As tom also stated military aircraft are sometimes disabling atheir transponders, so your decoder will not see them.