WebTrak, Flightradar24 and noise maps: free ways to check aircraft noise, compared

You can learn a lot about aircraft noise without paying anything. The catch is that each free tool was built for a different job: following one flight, showing an airport's operations to its neighbours, or mapping average noise for planners. Knowing what each one leaves out is what stops you drawing the wrong conclusion about a house.

Which free tool answers which question

Airport flight trackers: WebTrak and others

Many large airports run a public flight tracker for their neighbours. The most common is WebTrak, made by Envirosuite (formerly EMS Brüel & Kjær) and used by Heathrow, Gatwick, Dublin and Airservices Australia, among others. Some airports use other systems under their own names.

WebTrak takes its flight data from air traffic control radar rather than from volunteers' receivers. Click a flight to see its type, height and route. What sets it apart is the noise monitors: the airport's fixed monitors appear on the map, with the level each one measured as a plane passed.

Each airport sets its own rules:

• Delay. Flights appear after a delay. Airservices Australia shows them 3 minutes behind; Gatwick holds its live replay back 25 minutes so the tracks are accurate.
• History. Gatwick lets you replay up to three months. Other airports keep more or less.
• Accuracy. Airservices Australia gives heights to within 125 ft and says its data, once checked the next day, is more accurate than the live view. It also warns that WebTrak should not be relied on for personal, legal or financial decisions.

Use it to check the height and route of the planes over a street, and what the nearest monitor measured. The limit is time: to see a pattern you have to replay days one by one, and the readings only cover the monitors' locations.

Flightradar24, FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange

These are the trackers most people know. They show flights worldwide in real time, mostly from the position signals planes broadcast, picked up by receivers run by volunteers. ADS-B explained covers how that works.

The live map is free on all three. History is where they differ:

• Flightradar24 lets free users play back the last 7 days. Silver extends that to 90 days, Gold to 365 days and Business to 3 years.
• FlightAware shows the last 7 days free. Its Premium plans go back 3, 5 or 8 months.
• ADS-B Exchange does not filter flights out of its map. The live map is free with adverts; the ad-free subscription, $29.95 a year when we checked, includes a replay function and history back to March 2020.
• ADSB.lol, an open, community-run tracker, publishes its data free of charge as a daily archive. It is where the flight data behind our reports comes from.

They share the same limits. None of them shows noise: you see a plane's height and have to judge the rest. Flightradar24 says its coverage may not reach every flight landing and taking off, as some planes only appear higher up, and that some military and government aircraft are blocked. And they are built around aircraft rather than places: easy for following one flight, slow for counting how many passed over one street in a day.

Official noise maps

Governments and airports publish noise maps free of charge. In Europe, every airport with more than 50,000 flights a year must be mapped every five years (the last round was 2022, the next is 2027), and the maps show bands from 55 dB Lden. The UK and US publish their own contours as well.

A noise map is the quickest way to see whether an area sits inside an airport's official footprint. But it shows an average, drawn in broad bands, often from several years ago, and many people are bothered outside its quietest band. Official airport noise maps explained covers where to find them and how to read them.

Airport noise-monitor reports

Airports that monitor noise often publish the results. Heathrow has 39 noise monitors and publishes community noise reports from them. Dublin Airport runs 32, of which 25 are fixed and 7 portable. It publishes a monthly noise and operations report covering runway use, wind and traffic, quarterly reports from its noise and flight track monitoring system, and regular reports from portable monitors placed where communities have asked for them.

These are real measurements rather than models, which makes them useful for checking a figure you have seen elsewhere. The limit is location: a monitor 2 km away, or under a different approach, may say little about your street. Some airports take requests: Heathrow's residents can ask for a monitor, and new locations are agreed each year.

Our free flight map

Our free flight map replays a real day of landings and take-offs at an airport in about a minute. You can jump straight to the busiest day, a typical day in each runway direction or the busiest night, or pick any day from the calendar. Tap a street and it tells you how many loud planes it heard that day, loud meaning above 65 dB outdoors, enough to interrupt a conversation.

It is built for the question the other tools make slow: not "where did that plane go?" but "how many loud planes did this street get?". The limit is that it shows one day at a time. A day in each direction and the busiest night give a good first picture; the full year is what a report adds.

Local residents' groups

Residents' associations, campaign groups and the community forums many airports run are free sources of something no tool gives you: what living there is like, which weeks are bad, and what is changing. They are often the first to know about a consultation on new flight paths or more flights.

Treat them as you would any first-hand account. They tell you how people feel, which matters, but not how many planes a particular house will hear.

How to combine them

For one address, a free check might go like this:

1. Look at the official noise map. Is the house inside a contour, and how old is the map?
2. Find out which runway direction sends planes over the house, and how often the airport uses it. Our airport pages give the split for each airport.
3. Replay a day in each direction and the busiest night on the free map, and tap the street.
4. Check heights and measured noise on the airport's tracker, if it has one, for the flights that passed closest.
5. Ask locals what the bad weeks are like and whether anything is changing.

That is several hours of work for a good sample of days. How to check aircraft noise before buying a house sets out the full set of checks, and a report does the counting for a whole year at the exact address.