EGKK · LGW · London, England
Planes near LGW: live flight tracking at London Gatwick
London Gatwick (LGW / EGKK) serves London, England, United Kingdom. A compact operation south of London, squeezed between four other busy fields.
The live map
Aircraft the volunteer receiver network can currently hear around London. The frame is fixed on the field; tap or click an aircraft to open its full details.
Nothing here is filtered. Military aircraft, aircraft in the FAA's LADD privacy programme and aircraft using temporary addresses all appear the same way anything else does. Open the full map to pan, zoom and switch layers.
Movements we watched happen
Snapshot written . This page refreshes by itself while it is open.
These are transitions the receiver network actually observed at LGW, each with the time it was seen. Nothing here is guessed from a timetable.
Why there may be fewer departures than arrivals
A departure is only counted once a receiver has seen the aircraft on the ground here first. That guard stops us inventing takeoffs for aircraft that merely flew overhead, and it costs us real ones: hearing an aircraft sitting on an airport surface needs a receiver with line of sight to that surface, which is the hardest reception there is. An arrival only needs the aircraft to have been seen airborne, and airborne coverage is very good.
So at any airport without a clear view of the ground, this list will show fewer departures than actually happened. If you see more arrivals than departures below, read that as a fact about where the antennas are, not about the airport.
| Time | Movement | Flight | Aircraft |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02:43 UTC | Arrival | EZY72WY | A20N · G-UZLP |
| 02:40 UTC | Arrival | EZY8106 | A320 · G-EZUA |
| 02:39 UTC | Arrival | EZY58DK | A20N · G-UZLM |
| 02:37 UTC | Arrival | EZY26XM | A320 · G-EJCJ |
4 movements in the current recording window.
What appears to be inbound and outbound right now
Where the aircraft in range right now are most likely heading, worked out from their callsigns rather than watched happening.
How this list is built
We take the aircraft the receiver network can currently hear, read the callsign each one is broadcasting, and look that callsign up in an index of the routes it has actually flown before. An entry means this callsign's most commonly observed route ends at LGW. That is a good guide to where a flight is going. It is not a flight plan: nobody has told us today's routing, and we would rather say that than dress an inference up as a schedule.
The consequences are worth knowing. A diversion or an unusual routing will be listed wrong. A charter, a positioning leg, or any flight the index has not seen before is missing entirely. You will occasionally see an aircraft here sitting on the ground on the far side of a continent, which is the method showing its working rather than hiding it. There are no scheduled times or arrival estimates on this page because neither can be computed honestly from what we hold.
For gates, delays and cancellations the airline and the airport are authoritative. This page is for what is actually in the air.
Inbound 9 aircraft
| Flight | From | Altitude | Ground speed | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EZY38VUA320 · G-EJCA | SplitLDSP / SPU | on the ground | 0 kt | 1 nmNNE of the field |
| BAW2230B772 · G-YMMA | BangkokVTBS / BKK | 38,000 ft | 447 kt | 281 nmE of the field |
| QTR6QB789 · A7-BHG | DohaOTHH / DOH | 37,975 ft | 458 kt | 987 nmESE of the field |
| SIA312A359 · 9V-SJB | SingaporeWSSS / SIN | 40,000 ft | 429 kt | 1,085 nmE of the field |
| UAE9WB77W · A6-ENY | DubaiOMDB / DXB | 34,000 ft | 475 kt | 1,378 nmESE of the field |
| JBU2104A21N · N2169J | BostonKBOS / BOS | 33,025 ft | 554 kt | 2,538 nmWNW of the field |
| TSC728A321 · C-GEZX | MontréalCYUL / YUL | 21,175 ft | 477 kt | 2,757 nmWNW of the field |
| UBT78TB789 · G-CKOF | OrlandoKMCO / MCO | 36,975 ft | 574 kt | 2,913 nmWNW of the field |
| BAW38WB772 · G-YMME | OrlandoKMCO / MCO | 37,000 ft | 569 kt | 3,082 nmWNW of the field |
Outbound none matched
| Flight | To | Altitude | Ground speed | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No aircraft were matched to this airport at that moment. That is a statement about the schedule index, not about the sky. | ||||
About London Gatwick
- ICAO codeEGKK
- IATA codeLGW
- ServesLondon
- RegionEngland, United Kingdom
- Coordinates51.149°N, 0.186°W
Gatwick sits in the Sussex countryside south of London and runs a notably concentrated operation for its size. It shares the southeast of England with Heathrow, Stansted, Luton and London City, which between them make this one of the most complicated pieces of airspace in Europe. Very little of it is straightforward, and the routings reflect that.
Frame the map to hold all the London airports at once. The way five separate arrival and departure flows are woven together without crossing is the whole story of this airspace, and no single-airport view shows it.
What the codes mean
Airports carry two identifiers and they are not interchangeable.
LGW is the IATA code: three letters, the one printed on a
boarding pass and a baggage tag, assigned for commercial purposes and reused across
the world without any geographic logic.
EGKK is the ICAO code: four letters, used by air traffic
control, flight planning systems and trackers like this one. Its first
two letters, EG, marks
the United Kingdom, because ICAO allocates the code space by region.
The callsigns in the lists above are a third thing again. A callsign is what the crew typed into the transponder for this leg, so it changes flight by flight, while the registration and the 24-bit hex address stay with the airframe. When a callsign and a registration disagree, the registration is usually the more reliable of the two.
How to read the numbers
Altitude is pressure altitude, which is what the aircraft's air data system reads with a standard pressure setting. It is not height above the ground and it is not always the altitude the crew is flying to. Near London that gap is most obvious on approach, when a tracker can show a figure that does not match what is on the flight deck.
Ground speed is speed across the earth, not through the air. A strong tailwind can add a hundred knots or more to it without the aircraft flying any faster, which is why two aircraft at the same level going opposite ways can show wildly different numbers. Track is the direction of travel over the ground, which is not the direction the nose is pointing when there is any crosswind at all.
Aircraft go missing from this map for reasons that have nothing to do with the aircraft. Reception is line of sight, so terrain and distance cut it off abruptly; a good deal of light aviation in the United States broadcasts on 978 MHz rather than 1090 MHz; and plenty of aircraft, including gliders and older light types, carry no ADS-B at all and are not required to. How ADS-B works covers all of that properly.
Other airports on the map
The nearest fields with their own live page:
