OSINT At Home #18 – How to track and find planes and flights

This tutorial is part 18 of the OSINT At Home series. The tutorial is a simple and easy-to-follow guide on how to track planes and flights using a number of tools, namely how to use FlightRadar24. The tutorial will take you through how to identify where a plane is going based on an image, and how to identify the model and airline of a plane seen on Google Maps or Google Earth. This tutorial also covers areas such as how to find out when a satellite image was taken using ApolloMapping, and how to save KML and KMZ information of flights from FlightRadar, to load it in Google Earth.

Being able to identify planes and track flights is a whole world on its own, and deals with one of the most underrated forms of digital investigations, flight tracking.

Being able to track flights and identify planes is always important, whether you’re a researcher, hobbyist or journalist. In these cases we go from a YouTuber doing a callout for help trying to identify where a plane is going that was seen on Google Maps, to identifying what a plane is that is seen taking off at Heathrow.

The final case study focusses on the identification of planes that were destroyed on the apron of Khartoum International Airport in April 2023 during clashes between Sudanese military and RSF. Doing this type of verification was important, as it allowed us to identify and verify the planes, what they were, where they came from, and their owning airlines, that were destroyed in Khartoum.

The tools covered in this tutorial include Flight Radar 24, Apollo Mapping, Google Earth and Google Maps.

A big thanks to Scott from ‪@PlanesTrainsEverything‬ (   • Police stop me on my short West Highl...  ) for first spotting flight N534LA and asking about it, and to Gerjon_ for actually finding it (https://twitter.com/Gerjon_/status/16...) and suggesting I do a tutorial on tracking flights. This just goes to show the brilliance of this community – a big reason why I do this work.

The OSINT At Home series is useful for those looking to find digital breadcrumbs and pick up some methods of open source intelligence (OSINT), digital investigations and good old plain research. No matter who you are, or where you are in the world, you can follow these tutorials from home with publicly available information to answer questions such as who, what, where and when.

TOOLS
FlightRadar24: https://www.flightradar24.com/
Apollo Mapping: https://imagehunter.apollomapping.com/

MORE RESOURCES
Gerjon_ on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Gerjon_/status/16...
Rae Baker: https://www.raebaker.net/blog/5-metho...
Bellingcat: https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/...
Nixintel: https://nixintel.info/osint/using-fli...

CREDITS FOR THIS TUTORIAL
Planes, Trains, Everything (really nice account):    • Police stop me on my short West Highl...  
Planet Labs PBC satellite imagery from SkySat
Music Intro: Calm River - Nesterouk
Music Intro: World’s Fair – God Mode
Music Title and End: Dhaka by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-...
Artist: http://incompetech.com/