About SquawkUK
SquawkUK is a free live map of UK military aircraft, built for British aviation spotters. It covers RAF and USAF bases, the Mach Loop and the other low flying areas, and the airshow calendar.
I am a spotter myself. I go out to the Mach Loop, to RAF Coningsby and to air shows, and I could not find a free tracker that focused on UK military, so I built one. It is a hobby project and I work on it in my own time.
It is free, and it stays free
No adverts. No subscriptions. No paywall. Nothing for sale, and no premium tier holding anything back. The site makes no money, it is not funded by anyone, and it is not a business.
Accounts are optional. You can use the whole map without one. An account only exists so you can keep a personal spotting log, set alerts for your own area, and take part in the community section.
Where the data comes from
SquawkUK does not run its own receivers. Every aircraft position here comes from community ADS-B networks, run by volunteers who host receivers and share what they pick up. The site would not exist without them.
- Aircraft positions from adsb.lol, licensed under ODbL 1.0.
- Aircraft photographs from planespotters.net, shown with their own credit on each photo.
- Flight routes from adsbdb.
- Weather from Open-Meteo.
- Maps from OpenStreetMap contributors, with satellite imagery from Esri.
- Airfield codes and locations matched against the OurAirports public dataset.
The site is polite about how it asks. Requests are cached on the server and shared between everyone looking at the map, so a hundred people watching at once does not mean a hundred times the requests upstream.
What this site will not do
A tracker is only worth anything if you can trust what it shows you, so these are deliberate rules rather than things not got round to yet.
- It never guesses a position. Some aircraft broadcast an identity but no position. Larger trackers can still place those, because they run receiver networks that work out a location by timing the same signal at several stations. We cannot do that. Those aircraft go in a "Heard, no position" list instead of being put on the map somewhere plausible.
- It never plots the receiver instead of the aircraft. The feed carries a rough position for the receiver that heard an aircraft. It is tempting to use it and it would be wrong. Checked against a real RAF Chinook, it was 300km out.
- It says when the data is missing. If the feed stops or starts returning nothing, the map says so. An empty map and a broken feed look identical, and letting you think the sky is empty would be its own kind of lie.
- It does not invent aircraft facts. The reference pages are compiled by hand from published sources. Where something is not confirmed it is marked as unconfirmed or left out, rather than filled in with a good guess.
- It does not name a squadron from a callsign. Tactical callsigns rotate between missions. Guessing would look clever and be confidently wrong.
What it shows, and what it cannot
Everything here comes from ADS-B and Mode S signals that aircraft broadcast themselves, picked up by volunteer receivers on the ground. It is public radio, the same as anyone with an aerial can receive.
That also sets the limits. Not every aircraft transmits, coverage varies by location and altitude, and low flying aircraft are often below the horizon of every nearby receiver, which is exactly when a spotter most wants to see them. Nothing here is real time to the second, and none of it should be used for anything operational. It is for general interest and spotting.
Get in touch
If something on the site is wrong, especially a frequency, an airfield or an aircraft fact, please say so and I will correct it. The community section is the easiest place to reach me, or use the contact details on Try My Site, who host and monitor the site.