How flight tracking works
Where flight data comes from: schedules, airline operations, airport systems and aircraft transponders, and why sources sometimes disagree.
Four layers of data
Flight information is assembled from several layers. Schedules are published months ahead by airlines. Operational updates, gate assignments, delays, cancellations, come from airline and airport systems. Position data comes from aircraft transponders: ADS-B signals broadcast by the aircraft itself, received by ground stations and satellites. Finally, data providers merge these layers into a single feed.
Each layer has its own freshness: a schedule may be months old, while a position update is seconds old.
Scheduled, estimated, actual
A trustworthy tracker labels every time. Scheduled is the published plan. Estimated is a prediction based on current operations. Actual is what really happened, the aircraft left the gate or touched down. FlightScanNow shows these labels explicitly and never fills a missing value with a guess.
Why trackers sometimes disagree
Different services use different providers, refresh at different intervals and apply different rules for when to switch a status. A tracker may show "departed" at gate push-back while another waits for wheels-up. Small disagreements are normal; large ones usually mean one source is stale. The airport's own displays are always the operational authority.
What FlightScanNow does with your search
When you search a flight number, our server queries a verified data provider, caches the answer briefly so repeated searches don't trigger duplicate requests, and shows you when the data was last refreshed and where it came from. No account is needed and searches are not linked to your identity.