LEBL · BCN · Barcelona, Catalonia
Planes near BCN: live flight tracking at Barcelona-El Prat Josep Tarradellas
Barcelona-El Prat Josep Tarradellas (BCN / LEBL) serves Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Squeezed between the Mediterranean, a river delta and a coastal mountain range.
The live map
Aircraft the volunteer receiver network can currently hear around Barcelona. 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 BCN, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02:44 UTC | Arrival | ENT8RU | B738 · SP-ENX |
1 movement 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 BCN. 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LVL2602A332 · EC-NRG | Buenos Aires (Ezeiza)SAEZ / EZE | 29,175 ft | 472 kt | 117 nmSW of the field |
| AAL742B788 · N884AA | PhiladelphiaKPHL / PHL | 41,000 ft | 535 kt | 573 nmWNW of the field |
| BCS3LRA306 · D-AEAJ | SchkeuditzEDDP / LEJ | 32,975 ft | 416 kt | 597 nmNNE of the field |
| QTR5NB789 · A7-BHS | DohaOTHH / DOH | 39,975 ft | 459 kt | 941 nmESE of the field |
| ETD3P1B789 · A6-BLH | Abu DhabiOMAA / AUH | 35,975 ft | 467 kt | 990 nmESE of the field |
| TAM8114B789 · CC-BGZ | São PauloSBGR / GRU | 39,000 ft | 490 kt | 2,089 nmSW of the field |
| DAL194A339 · N418DX | AtlantaKATL / ATL | 37,000 ft | 545 kt | 3,603 nmWNW of the field |
| UAL769B788 · N26910 | ChicagoKORD / ORD | on the ground | 0 kt | 3,831 nmNW of the field |
| UAL672B772 · N224UA | San FranciscoKSFO / SFO | 35,000 ft | 588 kt | 4,484 nmNW of the field |
Outbound 5 aircraft
| Flight | To | Altitude | Ground speed | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BCS3WPB752 · EC-KLD | MadridLEMD / MAD | 22,075 ft | 397 kt | 658 nmN of the field |
| LVL2601A332 · EC-ODA | Buenos Aires (Ezeiza)SAEZ / EZE | 34,000 ft | 472 kt | 1,161 nmSW of the field |
| UAE81WB77L · A6-EWB | Mexico CityMMMX / MEX | 36,000 ft | 445 kt | 1,364 nmESE of the field |
| ETD9TCB789 · A6-BLU | Abu DhabiOMAA / AUH | 39,000 ft | 492 kt | 2,756 nmE of the field |
| UAE256B77L · A6-EWJ | DubaiOMDB / DXB | 35,000 ft | 529 kt | 4,244 nmWNW of the field |
About Barcelona-El Prat Josep Tarradellas
- ICAO codeLEBL
- IATA codeBCN
- ServesBarcelona
- RegionCatalonia, Spain
- Coordinates41.297°N, 2.078°E
Barcelona-El Prat sits southwest of the city in the Llobregat delta, with the sea immediately southeast and the Collserola ridge behind the city to the northwest. That leaves a narrow band of usable airspace along the coast, and the traffic is organised accordingly, with most arrivals and departures working over the water.
The Balearic islands lie a short distance offshore and generate a great deal of summer traffic. Short hops out to Mallorca and Ibiza are frequent enough that they form their own visible stream on the map between June and September.
What the codes mean
Airports carry two identifiers and they are not interchangeable.
BCN 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.
LEBL is the ICAO code: four letters, used by air traffic
control, flight planning systems and trackers like this one. Its first
two letters, LE, marks
Spain, 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 Barcelona 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:
