Looking up flight history: finding an aircraft’s past flights and routes

A photo from yesterday with the registration half hidden. A special livery that supposedly flies the same route every week. A jumbo that unexpectedly turned up at your home airport. Behind all these questions lies the same task: looking up an aircraft’s flight history. This guide shows you how to reliably look up past flights and routes, how playback works, how far back the well-known services reach and where to find data when the convenience apps hit their limits.

Looking up flight history: the short answer

You search a flight tracker service by the aircraft’s registration and open its history. There you see the past flights with date, route, flight number and scheduled and actual times. You can show each flight on the map or replay it with playback. For free, this reaches back about a week at the big services, and considerably longer with a subscription or as a feeder. For even older data or very precise tracks, you turn to raw data sources or your own receiver.

Registration, flight number or hex code: the right search term

The most common mistake in research is the wrong starting point. Flight tracker services know three different keys, and each answers a different question.

• Registration: The registration, such as D-AIXP or N12345, belongs to exactly one aircraft. Searching for it gives you the history of that one airframe – regardless of which flight number it operated under. This is the standard route for spotters. How the search works in detail is shown in Finding an aircraft by registration or hex code.
• Flight number: A flight number such as LH400 designates a route, not an aircraft. Its history shows which aircraft flew this route on different days. Ideal if you want to know whether an airline occasionally uses a larger type on a route. The difference from the radio callsign is explained in Callsign and flight number.
• Hex code (ICAO 24-bit address): The transponder sends this address with every message. It is the key in many raw data sources and on community maps. What is behind it is described in The ICAO 24-bit address explained.

Important for longer research: the 24-bit address is assigned by the state of registry. If an aircraft changes its country of registration, it usually gets a new registration and a new address. To the flight tracker service it is then a different aircraft, and the history seems to break off. How to follow such changes is covered in Understanding re-registrations.

What the history list tells you

Once you’ve found a registration, you usually get a tabular list. The columns differ depending on the service, but these details are typical:

Field	What it shows	What you use it for as a spotter
Date	Day of the flight, often in UTC or local time	Matching against your photo’s capture date
From / To	Departure and destination airports	Recognizing rotation patterns, estimating the next arrival
Flight number	Identifier under which the flight operated	Checking whether the aircraft was on a scheduled, charter or ferry flight
Scheduled / actual time	planned and actual takeoff and landing time	Putting delays and the real landing time at your spot in context
Flight duration	Time between takeoff and landing	Recognizing unusual detours or holding patterns

Pay attention to the time zone. Many services show times in either UTC or local time. If you took a photo at 14:12 German summer time, the same moment appears in the list as 12:12 UTC. If you forget that, you quickly search for the wrong flight.

Playback: replaying the flight

The list answers the “where to,” playback the “how.” When you replay a single flight, the aircraft symbol moves across the map in time lapse. At the same time you see altitude, speed and heading at each moment. For spotters, that clears up questions no table can answer:

• Which runway was in use? The track on final approach shows which runway the aircraft touched down on – handy when you’re planning a spot for next week.
• Was there a go-around? A sudden climb shortly before the threshold and a second approach loop are unmistakable in playback.
• Was the aircraft in a holding pattern? Oval patterns before the approach reveal holdings. How to recognize them is explained in Spotting holding patterns on the flight tracker.
• Did the aircraft really pass your spot? For sightings without a legible registration, you narrow down which aircraft was within range at the time of the shot.

Flightradar24 also offers Global Playback on its website. You choose date and time and see all traffic in a map section, with playback speed from 1x to 300x and applicable filters. That way you replay an entire morning at your airport without opening each flight individually. You’ll find step-by-step instructions in the Flightradar24 guide.

How far back does the history reach? The services compared

The length of the history is where the services differ most clearly – and where subscriptions come into play. The following details are based on the providers’ own descriptions as of October 2026. Terms change, so check the current overview before signing up.

Service	Free	With subscription	As a feeder	Special feature
Flightradar24	up to 7 days	Silver 90 days, Gold 365 days, Business up to 3 years	Business subscription for active feeders	Global Playback for entire map sections
FlightAware	last 7 days publicly visible	3, 5 or 8 months depending on tier	Enterprise account with 8 months	strong flight plan and status data
OpenSky Network (API)	anonymously only current positions	–	–	Flights of individual aircraft from the previous day, tracks up to 30 days back
adsb.lol	live map	–	–	daily archives under the open ODbL license
own receiver (tar1090)	as long as you store it	–	–	full control, but only your reception area

Which subscription tier is worthwhile for you is worked through in detail in Flightradar24 Silver, Gold and Business explained. How to open the history at FlightAware is shown in the FlightAware guide, and Flightradar24 and FlightAware head to head compares both services. For most spotters: if you sort your photos promptly, seven days gets you surprisingly far. If you want to follow patterns over months, though – such as the deployments of a particular special livery – you’ll benefit from a longer history.

Going further back: feeder accounts and raw data

If you research regularly, you don’t necessarily have to pay for a subscription. There are three ways to longer or more detailed data.

Become a feeder

The big networks live on volunteer receiving stations and reward them. FlightAware gives operators of a PiAware station a free Enterprise account with eight months of history, and Flightradar24 gives active feeders a Business subscription as long as the station delivers data. A Raspberry Pi, an SDR stick and an antenna are enough. Setup is described in Setting up PiAware and Setting up fr24feed, and what the individual programs offer is compared in ADS-B feeder programs compared.

OpenSky Network

OpenSky is a nonprofit association from Switzerland that collects ADS-B and Mode S data for research. For anonymous queries of position data, the public interface only returns the current state. You query the flights of a specific aircraft through a separate endpoint – each time for windows of at most two days, and only from the previous day on, because the flight list is updated overnight in a batch run. According to the documentation, detailed tracks of individual flights reach back up to 30 days. For older raw data, OpenSky points to its own database access, which is aimed at researchers. More on this in OpenSky Network explained.

Community networks with open archives

Community maps like ADS-B Exchange, adsb.lol or adsb.fi use the tar1090 web interface and, by their own account, show data that is as unfiltered as possible. adsb.lol additionally publishes daily archives of its reception data on GitHub, with one compressed file per aircraft and day under the open ODbL license. For a quick look that is inconvenient, but for your own analyses with a bit of programming knowledge it is a goldmine. You’ll find a comparison of the community services in Unfiltered community trackers compared.

Your own receiver as an archive

The most reliable long-term history is the one you store yourself. With the option for persistent traces, tar1090 shows the last eight hours by default, and the period can be extended in the configuration. With the decoder readsb you can also write history data and heatmaps permanently to disk – according to the project documentation, these files stay until you delete them yourself. The catch: you only see what your antenna receives. Setup is explained in Installing readsb and tar1090 and Flight tracking on the PC.

Why the history has gaps

No history is complete. If you know the typical causes, you won’t draw wrong conclusions from a missing trace.

• Missing coverage: Over oceans, deserts or in sparsely populated regions, there are few ground receivers. Some services fill such stretches with estimated positions, others simply show a gap.
• No ADS-B: Aircraft that only transmit Mode S without position data can only be located by multilateration – and only where enough receivers are located. The technology behind it is explained in MLAT explained simply.
• Blocking programs: Commercial services respect blocking lists such as the US LADD program. FlightAware writes in its FAQ that blocked aircraft are not displayed publicly and that details are accessible only to owners or operators. Community networks, by their own account, filter less.
• Re-registration: New registration, new 24-bit address – a new file begins for the service.
• Poor matching: Sometimes a flight is filed under the wrong flight number or without a registration, for example on ferry flights. You can still find it via the hex code.

For detailed troubleshooting, see Why an aircraft doesn’t show up on Flightradar. Basic rule: if a sighting is important, confirm it with a second source.

In practice: how to go about a search

Whether it’s an illegible registration, a livery hunt or plain curiosity: the process is almost always the same.

How to systematically match sightings with reception data is shown in Matching sightings with ADS-B logs. For blurry photos, Determining an illegible registration also helps.

Flight history or life story?

The flight history shows you movements: when an aircraft was where. The life story of an airframe – first flight, delivery, previous owners, earlier registrations, liveries – you won’t find there. Fleet databases are responsible for that. An overview of the most important sources is offered in Fleet databases at a glance, and how to assemble a complete biography from them is explained in Researching an aircraft’s life story.

The combination is especially powerful: the database tells you which aircraft wears the special livery you’re looking for, and the flight history shows you which routes it is currently flying. How to track down special liveries is described in Finding special liveries.

What to keep in mind

• Terms change. Providers regularly adjust history lengths and subscription contents. The values in this article reflect the status as of October 2026.
• Estimated positions are not measurements. If a track over the sea is suspiciously straight, it may have been interpolated.
• Respect blocked aircraft. Blocking programs exist for reasons of privacy and security. Don’t publish movement profiles of private owners.
• Always factor in time zones. A wrongly converted photo reliably leads you to the wrong flight.
• Save your data. What you see in the free history today is gone in a week. Note important things right away, for example in your spotter logbook.

Conclusion

Looking up an aircraft’s flight history is, in most cases, a matter of minutes: search the registration, open the flight, replay it. The real art lies in the right search term, in clean time zone conversion and in knowing how far back your service reaches. For the first week the free view is enough, for months you need a subscription or a feeder account, and for anything beyond that raw data and your own receiver help. Gaps are part of it – if you know them, you interpret your history correctly.