Live Flight Tracker Over Auckland and New Zealand
This live flight tracker shows every aircraft broadcasting its position in the sky around Auckland and across New Zealand, arriving from Sydney, descending into Mangere, climbing out over the Hauraki Gulf or transiting to Christchurch. It updates about every fifteen seconds from public ADS-B flight position data and animates smoothly between updates. Tap any aircraft to see its airline, type, altitude and route.
What you’re looking at
Every dot is a real aircraft, broadcasting its position right now via ADS-B. ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) is the radio system that almost all commercial aircraft use to announce where they are, how high they are, and where they’re heading. The data comes from the open OpenSky Network, which aggregates feeds from thousands of volunteer ground receivers around the world.
Coverage is best near land. A flight from Singapore is invisible until it passes within range of a New Zealand or Australian receiver. So this isn’t every plane in the sky — it’s every plane within reach of an ADS-B receiver and currently broadcasting. For a busy airport like Auckland that still adds up to the bulk of the visible action: the Tasman shuttle, the long-haul approaches, the regional ATR turboprops working their way around the country, and the helicopter doing scenic flights over Rangitoto.
Hover over a plane to see its callsign and altitude. Use the buttons below the map to zoom from tight around the airport out to the wider South Pacific.
Auckland Airport — the country’s busiest gateway
Auckland Airport (IATA code AKL, ICAO code NZAA) is by far New Zealand’s busiest airport, handling around three quarters of the country’s international air traffic and a large share of its domestic flights. Located at Mangere on the southern shore of the Manukau Harbour, the airport has a single main runway (05R/23L) running roughly southwest-to-northeast, with a parallel general aviation strip (05L/23R) currently used for taxiing and smaller aircraft. A second full runway has been on the master plan for decades and is expected to be needed within the next ten to fifteen years as traffic recovers and grows beyond pre-pandemic levels.
In a typical week the airport handles flights from Air New Zealand, Qantas, Jetstar, Virgin Australia, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, China Airlines, China Eastern, China Southern, Emirates, Qatar Airways, United Airlines, Air Tahiti Nui, Fiji Airways, LATAM Chile and several others, with seasonal additions throughout the year. Domestic services connect the main centres of Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown roughly hourly during the day, with smaller turboprop operations linking provincial destinations like Tauranga, New Plymouth, Napier, Nelson and Invercargill.
The trans-Tasman shuttle and long-haul rhythm
The busiest single corridor through Auckland’s airspace is the trans-Tasman, with frequent services to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Perth and Adelaide. These routes are heavily peaked: a wave of departures leaves Auckland between 6am and 9am, and a matching wave of arrivals comes in mid-evening. Long-haul departures cluster differently — flights to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Vancouver typically leave in the evening to land in North America the following morning, while flights to Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai depart in the late morning or early afternoon.
Long-haul arrivals tend to cluster pre-dawn, with the LA, San Francisco, Vancouver and Houston flights all landing within a couple of hours of each other. That’s why Auckland Airport’s international terminal has a distinctly nocturnal rhythm, with a sleepy lull mid-morning and a busy push from late afternoon onwards.
How aircraft are tracked
Most of the dots on this map come from ADS-B Out, a system mandated for almost all commercial aircraft. The plane continuously broadcasts its identity, position, altitude, heading and speed over a radio frequency that anyone with a small antenna can receive. Volunteer enthusiasts run thousands of receivers around the world and pool the data through services like the OpenSky Network, FlightAware and Flightradar24. New Zealand has good coverage along its main population centres and out to about 200–300 kilometres offshore, so flights become visible as they cross into Tasman or Pacific approach airspace and disappear off the map again as they head out into the open ocean.
Smaller aircraft — recreational pilots, some agricultural and military flights — may not broadcast ADS-B and will never appear here. Helicopters and float planes around the Hauraki Gulf and over Auckland city are usually visible, since most operators have fitted ADS-B equipment for safety reasons.