How Global Conflicts Are Changing the Way We Track Flights

Amid the multiple conflicts and crises unfolding across the world, the aviation sector is among those most directly affected. No-fly zones are often announced before or after the outbreak of major conflicts, making real-time flight tracking crucial not only for authorities but also for ordinary citizens seeking updates.

Flightradar24 is a Swedish internet service designed to display real-time flight tracking information. It aggregates data from multiple sources but, outside the United States, relies largely on crowdsourced information gathered by volunteers using ADS-B receivers, along with satellite-based ADS-B receivers. The platform can be accessed either through its publicly available website or through its mobile application.

Flightradar24 was created by Mikael Robertsson and Olov Lindberg, and it accurately captures movements across global airspace. Robertsson had earlier predicted the potential and scope of such an internet service. In 2010, when the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull released a vast ash cloud that grounded flights across Europe, millions turned to Flightradar24 to monitor flight movements—or the lack of them—in real time. From the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 to the onset of the COVID‑19 pandemic that crippled the travel industry in 2020, the platform became a widely used tool to check real-time flight updates.

More recently, during the Russia–Ukraine War, Flightradar24 was heavily used to monitor flight movements. Similarly, during Operation Sindoor and the India–Pakistan conflict 2025, many defence analysts and experts relied on the platform for updates. One feature that makes the service particularly useful during conflicts and military operations is that users can see the type of aircraft displayed on the map. The platform specifies whether the aircraft is a civilian airline, defence aircraft, privately owned plane, and so on. In this sense, Flightradar24 has democratised access to aviation information, allowing ordinary citizens to track developments in real time through websites and apps.

Because of its efficiency, many people have also been following the current Iran–Israel conflict through the Flightradar24 website. The US-Israel war on Iran rapidly cleared the airspace over the region, prompting widespread travel disruption that affected hundreds of thousands of travellers, and viewers around the world turned to the platform to monitor developments.

On February 28, after the United States and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran and Iran responded with retaliatory missile barrages across the Middle East, countries in the region swiftly shut their airspace. On Flightradar24, the impact on aviation was immediately visible. With large parts of the Middle East closed to air traffic, two narrow flight corridors emerged, crowded with the platform’s distinctive yellow aircraft symbols—one to the north of Iran through the Caucasus but below Ukraine’s closed airspace, and another to the south through Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Oman.

Flightradar24 has proven to be an efficient and reliable platform for real-time flight updates. Particularly during times of crisis and conflict, it has become a tool used not only by experts but also by ordinary citizens seeking to follow developments in global airspace.

This article is written by Satvik AVP, a student of Loyola Academy, Secunderabad, interning with Deccan Chronicle.