LTFM · IST · Istanbul, Istanbul
Planes near IST: live flight tracking at Istanbul Airport
Istanbul Airport (IST / LTFM) serves Istanbul, Istanbul, Türkiye. A very large new field on the Black Sea coast, at the hinge between Europe and Asia.
The live map
Aircraft the volunteer receiver network can currently hear around Istanbul. 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 IST, 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 02:50 UTC | Arrival | THY6TM | A321 · TC-JSK |
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 IST. 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 17 aircraft
| Flight | From | Altitude | Ground speed | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| THY6428B77L · TC-LJV | Ferno (VA)LIMC / MXP | 9,575 ft | 295 kt | 24 nmW of the field |
| THY6RDA21N · TC-LSM | Tymbou (Kirklar)LCEN / ECN | 7,175 ft | 276 kt | 26 nmSSE of the field |
| THY7QNB739 · TC-JYP | Manchester, Greater MancEGCC / MAN | 15,775 ft | 300 kt | 45 nmWNW of the field |
| MNB611A333 · TC-MCO | Köln (Cologne)EDDK / CGN | 36,500 ft | 471 kt | 346 nmWNW of the field |
| THY4ZQA21N · TC-LPH | HEBA | 32,000 ft | 395 kt | 450 nmSSE of the field |
| THY6419A332 · TC-JDO | ZurichLSZH / ZRH | 38,000 ft | 442 kt | 605 nmNW of the field |
| SIA392A359 · 9V-SMI | SingaporeWSSS / SIN | 40,000 ft | 430 kt | 831 nmE of the field |
| THY59B789 · TC-LMB | BangkokVTBS / BKK | 35,975 ft | 514 kt | 2,667 nmE of the field |
| THY91JB789 · TC-LLD | DetroitKDTW / DTW | 37,000 ft | 573 kt | 3,911 nmNW of the field |
| THY1RTA359 · TC-LGL | BostonKBOS / BOS | 34,775 ft | 596 kt | 4,018 nmNW of the field |
| THY6B77W · TC-JJH | ChicagoKORD / ORD | 31,075 ft | 536 kt | 4,203 nmNW of the field |
| THY8LVB77W · TC-JJF | TorontoCYYZ / YYZ | 33,000 ft | 517 kt | 4,316 nmNW of the field |
| THY48LA359 · TC-LHL | SepangWMKK / KUL | 14,025 ft | 376 kt | 4,520 nmE of the field |
| THY8B77W · TC-LJK | DullesKIAD / IAD | on the ground | 0 kt | 4,529 nmNW of the field |
| THY32GB77W · TC-JJP | AtlantaKATL / ATL | 31,000 ft | 538 kt | 4,686 nmNW of the field |
| THY8JKA359 · TC-LGN | SeattleKSEA / SEA | 22,800 ft | 485 kt | 5,181 nmNNW of the field |
| THY9WCA359 · TC-LGY | San FranciscoKSFO / SFO | on the ground | 10 kt | 5,812 nmNNW of the field |
Outbound 9 aircraft
| Flight | To | Altitude | Ground speed | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AFR1391A321 · F-GTAU | Paris (Roissy-en-France,LFPG / CDG | 33,975 ft | 420 kt | 354 nmWNW of the field |
| DLH1743A20N · D-AINL | MunichEDDM / MUC | 6,750 ft | 216 kt | 817 nmNW of the field |
| GEC8347B77L · D-ALFC | Frankfurt am MainEDDF / FRA | 6,500 ft | 228 kt | 978 nmNW of the field |
| THY4JDB789 · TC-LLJ | MiamiKMIA / MIA | 35,975 ft | 427 kt | 1,567 nmWNW of the field |
| THY24B77W · TC-JJE | TaoyuanRCTP / TPE | 33,000 ft | 512 kt | 2,041 nmE of the field |
| THY184B789 · TC-LLP | Mexico CityMMMX / MEX | 37,000 ft | 0 kt | 2,090 nmWNW of the field |
| THY52A333 · TC-LNE | BangkokVTBS / BKK | 39,000 ft | 459 kt | 3,423 nmE of the field |
| HKC9492A332 · B-LNV | UAAR | 26,300 ft | 395 kt | 4,256 nmENE of the field |
| THY11B77W · TC-JJK | New YorkKJFK / JFK | on the ground | 11 kt | 4,334 nmNW of the field |
About Istanbul Airport
- ICAO codeLTFM
- IATA codeIST
- ServesIstanbul
- RegionIstanbul, Türkiye
- Coordinates41.275°N, 28.732°E
Istanbul Airport sits northwest of the city near the Black Sea coast, on a site large enough that the field itself is worth zooming into. Its geography is its business model: almost everything between Europe and Asia, and a great deal between Europe and Africa, can be routed through this point without a large detour. Sabiha Gökçen, on the Asian side, appears in the same wide view.
Set the map wide east and west. The convergence of traffic from three continents onto one point is more obvious here than anywhere else on this site, and the callsign prefixes in the lists below show the same thing in text.
What the codes mean
Airports carry two identifiers and they are not interchangeable.
IST 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.
LTFM is the ICAO code: four letters, used by air traffic
control, flight planning systems and trackers like this one. Its first
two letters, LT, marks
Türkiye, 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 Istanbul 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:
