Collating and recording personal flight history has become easier and more popular thanks to the sheer amount of data available using flight tracking sites and archives.
You can also list and visualise your flight history using various flight logging tools.
In this article we will make a comprehensive overview of compiling your flight history including trying to track down historical flight numbers, flight times, seat number, aircraft type and aircraft registrations (tail numbers).
Most people compiling a detailed historical flight record are likely to be aviation enthusiasts or ‘avgeeks’.
We also see others looking for historical flight details for immigration/visa purposes or because they are considering making a compensation claim for delayed/cancelled flights against an airline (particularly under the European EC261/2004 regulation).
If you have had a delayed or cancelled flight in the last 3 years then AirHelp could assist in making a compensation claim on a ‘no win, no fee’ basis.
AirHelp is the world’s largest air passenger rights organisation. Enter your flight details into the AirHelp database to see if you could be eligible for up to €600/$650 compensation per passenger. It has an excellent rating (4.5) on Trustpilot.
Whatever your motivation, our guide below should hopefully prove useful for anyone searching their flying history.
Flight Radar & Flight Tracker Sites
Let’s start with the popular flight tracker and radar sites. These are websites or mobile apps which show the aircraft flying in a given location and usually have a live map format with aircraft icons.
The current method used by radar sites to track aircraft is by ADS-B or “Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast”.
The best known tracker site is FlightRadar24 which has a map radar and also gives data on individual flights.
Trackers can be very useful to monitor your flight before departure as they give you various information including flight times, aircraft type and registration (tail number).
One handy use of FlightRadar24 whilst waiting for your flight at an airport is to track the inbound flight of your aircraft. This can give you an immediate handle on possible delays – often before it is announced at the airport.
To do this you put in your flight number and from this you should find out the aircraft registration. Click the registration to find activity from that particular aircraft – you should see the data for the inbound flight preceding yours.
Other flight tracker and radar sites are:
- FlightAware– Basic users get 3 months of historical flight data but without aircraft registration data.
- FlightStats– Has a flight tracker facility for flights over the last calendar week.
- RadarBox – flight tracker radar run by AirNav Systems which has 7 days free data and subscription plans up to 365 days.
- Planefinder – well established flight radar site with 7 days free data and premium plan for 365 days.
- ADS-B Exchange – comprehensive unfiltered flight radar on the web which shows both civilian and military aircraft movements.
We will discuss some of these sites in more detail below for finding aircraft registration numbers.
Flight Log Display Sites
The following tools can help you put together and display your own past flights list:
- myFlightradar24
- BA97
- Flight Memory
- FlightMapper.io – a tool for analysing and mapping flight history.
- myPastFlights – a new flight mapping and stats visualisation resource
Some of these can also offer interesting map visualisations and statistical breakdowns. Now if you do not want to use any of these online tools then you can simply create a ‘my past flights’ spreadsheet or remain analogue and use a notebook!
A note of caution, it is best not to publicly display a list of future booked flights.
Putting Together your Flight History
Back in 2019 we started the process of putting together our own detailed flight history which spans quite a few decades. Whilst it’s easy to find flight details of recent flights it does get harder the further back you go!
You may need to do some significant detective work… the process can be quite a lot of fun and nostalgic looking back at old flights and trips taken.
You can potentially find various details of your past flights from the following:
- old boarding passes if you have kept any of them (including digital pdf files as well). This can give you flight number, seat number and flight departure time – note the date is often day/month but not the year.
- old emails of flight confirmations or travel plans.
- checking flight history by logging into an airline frequent flyer account or online travel agent account.
- past diary/calendar entries.
- old passport stamps can give you flight dates. Some countries (such as Thailand and Philippines) would write the flight number on the passport stamp when you enter and/or exit.
- old credit card and bank statements can give some details on flight bookings – price paid and approximate booking dates.
- old photos taken can offer nuggets of information – airport shots (digital) can give you the flight date and approximate time. Photos of your plane can give you the aircraft type and possibly a glimpse of the aircraft registration. Not only your own photos but those of family and friends.
British Airtours Boeing 737 at Naples airport (NAP) arrival from London Gatwick in 1987 - contact an airline directly to ask for your flights taken. In Europe under GDPR legislation people can request their data held by a company. For example, here is the privacy policy page for Easyjet – it is possible to contact the data protection team directly. Note that under the law companies in the EU are only compelled to keep data for 7 years.
- some people have put in a data privacy request to a government for travel records held. This is likely possible in Australia, Canada, UK and US.
Once you have gone through the initial process of collecting all your potential flight info, you can take the research a step further in order to fill in extra details – such as flight numbers, flight times and aircraft registration.
Aircraft Registration (Tail Number)
Registration of an aircraft is normally displayed at the rear part of the fuselage. It can also be found in abbreviated form (often the last 2 letters) on the front nose wheel doors, on the wing and/or tail.
Check any old photos you may have of a plane you travelled on to see if you can make out the registration. For old printed photos you may even need to use a magnifying glass to check!
The aircraft registration is a 5 or 6 digit serial number. The prefix denotes the country of registration of the plane. In the above Lufthansa case ‘D’ denotes Germany. Here are some common country codes:
N USA (known as the N number) G UK B China C Canada D Germany F France I Italy EC Spain EI Ireland PH Netherlands OE Austria HB Switzerland VH Australia ZK New Zealand CC Chile A6 United Arab Emirates 9V Singapore A full country listing is found here
For the Lufthansa aircraft in the above photo we can see that the registration is D-AIPZ (or Delta Alfa India Papa Zulu using the NATO phonetic alphabet).
When you have an aircraft registration you can use the air fleet site or PlaneSpotters site to denote the exact aircraft type and the age of the airframe.
D-AIPZ was an Airbus A320-211 which first flew in January 1991. In June 2020 it was put in storage and was scrapped in 2022.
In some countries it is also possible to look up the registration with the official aviation regulator:
- CAA official G numbers (UK)
- FAA N number search (USA)
- VH Aircraft resister (Australia)
- RZjets (worldwide third-party database)
Tips and Resources to Find your Aircraft Registration
There are a number of techniques and resources for finding the aircraft registration (tail number) of a flight. Some methods are relatively easy whilst others require significant research from obscure resources and more advanced knowledge – which is probably beyond the scope for those with just a casual interest.
It always helps if you already know the exact date, flight number and scheduled departure and arrival times.
Flightera
Flightera is a convenient site which should be your first port-of-call. It pulls together flight information from various data sources. You can search for your flight info which includes tail number, call sign, departure and arrival times. You can also search by route, airline, airport and aircraft registration.
The site is free and data is available going back to September 2017. We would recommend checking the data against other sources if possible.
If you put in your flight number you can expand the ‘Flight Calendar’ to see data all months and years. Click on your specific year/month and then exact day.
The flight is logged on a specific URL – for example, Qantas QF1 from Singapore to London Heathrow on 18 June 2018:
https://www.flightera.net/en/flight_details/Qantas-Singapore-London/QF1/WSSS/2018-06-11
You will find aircraft registration and more flight details lower down the page. In this case the aircraft was an Airbus A380-800 with reg VH-OQE:
Now lets look at the Flight Tracker websites mentioned earlier and how you can find aircraft registration data.
FlightRadar24
Flightradar24 will show 7 days of flight history for free including registration data. For going back further you require a subscription upgrade to Silver (90 days flight history), Gold (365 days) or Business (3 years).
Subscription costs are as follows:
Silver costs $2.99 per month or $12.99 per year, Gold costs $3.99 per month or $34.99 per year whilst a Business account is $49.99 per month or $499.99 per year.
FlightStats
FlightStats also shows 1 week of flight data for free. However FlightStats offers a Historical Flight Status feature as part of its Professional Subscription. It costs $24.99 per month and allows 250 flight searches by flight number or route – the data goes back to the year 2006.
This historical function is useful to find flight numbers and flight times though the accuracy of the data is not always certain. However, you will only find aircraft registration details going back to about 2015.
For example, logging in to Historical Flight Status and checking Qantas flight QF77 from Perth (PER) to Singapore (SIN) on 13 Dec 2008:
You can see that whilst we have flight times, aircraft type and some gate info there is no available tail number.
It is possible to take a subscription for just 1 month and then cancel.
FlightAware
FlightAware does not show tail numbers unless you upgrade to one of its Enterprise accounts which start at $100/month. It also offers full flight history for a specific flight number but this service is relatively expensive, particularly if you are after a single flight.
One quirky feature of FlightAware is that it is (sometimes) possible to find historical flight data using its URL data archive system.
This is an example of an Emirates flight from January 2014 from Dubai (OMDB) to Amsterdam (EHAM):
https://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/UAE149/history/20140129/1210Z/OMDB/EHAM
The FlightAware URL component lists flight number, date, takeoff time and four letter ICAO airport codes.
The difficulty of this method is the takeoff time which is in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC or GMT in old money). It may often be listed as 10 minutes after the scheduled departure time as well.
The Emirates flight had a scheduled departure time of 1610 local but was listed as 1210 (plus one needs to add a Z to the time in the URL).
We have come up blank for many flights even when knowing the scheduled departure time and date – however it’s worth a shot.
A further element is that FlightAware also URL archives by tail number.
If you have found a flight number URL page as above and get the “Upgrade account to see tail number” message seen in the bottom right-hand corner under “Aircraft Details” – then the aircraft registration is available.
You can find the tail number by a process of trial and error. First get a list of all registrations (current and historical) of the particular aircraft type from the fleet sites mentioned – in the Emirates case above it was the Boeing 777-200LR.
Replace the flight number “UAE149” in the FlightAware URL with all possible registration permutations (no spaces).
You will get “couldn’t track the flight” error pages until you find the right one…here we go, A6-EWD and bingo:
https://uk.flightaware.com/live/flight/A6EWD/history/20140129/1210Z/OMDB/EHAM
We are not sure how far back FlightAware has registration data – but we have personally managed to go back using the above techniques to at least 2011.
Planefinder
Planefinder is a radar-style tracker site and app. It has a historical playback feature which lets you view the live flights from anytime in the last 2 weeks on a worldwide map. Premium subscribers get 365 days of playback.
Until summer 2019, playback was actually available going all the way back to 2011 on the website.
However the iOS app version still apparently allows that historical playback facility – meaning this could be one of the best tools to search for flight registrations from 2011.
You need select Playback and change the date and time – and then search the flight map (by trial and error) to look for your flight.
BTS
BTS (the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics) – The official US government site has a detailed database of domestic US flights going back some decades. You can put in your origin airport and airline for any date going back to 1987 – and it will pull up the flight details for that day.
For example, these are the Delta Airlines departures from Seattle on 1 April 1995:
Aircraft registration data seems to be available from 1 January 1995.
Note, international flights are not covered by the database. Flights from some small domestic regional carriers are also missing.
Other Airport or Flight Movement data resources (advanced)
The following is a listing of various resources for more advanced users. From logs of flight movements at various airports to archives of “ACARS” data.
What is ACARS? ACARS stands for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. It is an electronic transmission system using VHF radio signals that allowed an aircraft to broadcast identification data to ground station receivers.
Some individuals have monitored and archived ACARS and SBS radio transmissions which can provide aircraft registration details for a flight number on a particular day. A flight could only be logged if it was flying over or near the data collection location point.
Coverage is not comprehensive and gets patchier the further back in time you go. Data is best for Europe, North America and Australia. It gets quite difficult to find data prior to the year 2000.
- Some of the following resources are on very dated websites which may not be “http secure”. Some could be simple email text threads.
- Some resources are offline and need to be accessed via archive.org’s Waybackmachine.
- You need to have a handle for flight numbers, callsigns and registrations as the presentation of data can vary greatly! ACARS data may only quote the callsign which can be different to the flight number – for example, KLM’s flight Amsterdam to London Heathrow KL1009 has a callsign KL27M.
LHR-LGW – If you have flown regularly from London Heathrow or London Gatwick then the LHR-LGW site is a brilliant resource. It has historical flight movement details going back decades.
Go to the “Archive’s Movements” section and you will find Heathrow and Gatwick Archive years – select your year and month and open the zipped file.
File extensions are a mixed bag depending on the year selected and sometimes open in your browser, spreadsheet or notepad.
The Heathrow archive is quite comprehensive, the Gatwick one less so – and as you go back in time the coverage gets more sparse.
LHR-LGW has a good ACARS database starting from January 1998 to April 2011. There is also a separate SBS archive running from July 2006 to the present day.
When looking at an archive list for a particular day remember that contact times are in UTC/GMT. A signal from an overnight flight from say Singapore to London may be picked up and listed early on the landing day (+1) rather than on the departure day.
Also if your flight is not listed then check the full flight rotation. For example, if searching for the Emirates flight EK149 (Dubai to Amsterdam) as mentioned earlier, you should also check the return flight EK150 (Amsterdam to Dubai) – and vice versa – which should normally have the same aircraft registration.
Some archives can look a little complex and may feature only 3 digits/letters of the aircraft registration in a monthly matrix. Here’s one from LHR-LGW from May 2000:
You may need to use the Air Fleets site to decipher the aircraft registration.
Dutch Plane Spotters has kept an excellent record of Amsterdam Schiphol flight movements over the last 15 years. The daily flight record is available from 12th November 2009 onwards.
You can group the data by airline, aircraft, place and other parameters. The flight coverage is almost comprehensive although we could not find all of our flights from that airport (perhaps due to those being Cityhopper-type flights from remote stands).
It scrapes the data from the official Schiphol website. Note, since March 2022 arrival flights do not have aircraft registration data.
16Right is an aviation media and flight tracking site for Sydney airport (SYD) in Australia run by Grahame Hutchison.
It has a very useful flight movements database going all the way back to 9 October 2005. Coverage is good but not complete – we noticed a lack of Virgin Blue flights in some years – since that airline did not use ACARS at the time.
For British Airways aircraft data try the Speedbird.online site which can give you data for the previous 12 months.
[Note, previously there were the Airline Source Sites – BA Source, Qantas Source, Virgin Atlantic, Emirates, Qatar, Aer Lingus Source – which had flight trackers for each airline – unfortunately they all closed in 2021 and no data is available on archive.org]
The London Stansted Aviation Society does have a London Stansted (STN) movements database between Jan 2002 and Feb 2007, though coverage is somewhat limited.
Air-Britain Stansted branch also has a list of Stansted movements from 2000 to 2011, although we noticed Ryanair flights were often not available.
EGPH is a site which maintains a comprehensive archive of flight movements at Edinburgh airport. This goes back as far as 1996 to the present day.
The acarsd.org site had archived worldwide ACARS logs from January 2006 to May 2014. The site is offline but the logs are still accessible here via archive.org.
ACARS logs from December 2001 to February 2014 are also available here and a mailing list archive (1998-2001) is found here.
Terry Wade Aviation Website had ACARS logs from Biggin Hill (UK) from late 2001 to June 2004. The Lycos-hosted site no longer exists but the archived version can be found here. You can still search through the data as the webpages were indexed (rather than being a database).
Libhomeradar [archive.org version given] is a site which had a range of worldwide flight data. Results ran from around 2012-2017 with patchy data though the interface was clear. Unfortunately the site has closed and archive.org could not archive the database. However we are aware that some individuals have scraped the data.
Skystef has an ACARS archive from Brussels Airport from 1 Jan 2012 to 16 Oct 2015 and from 16 Mar 2021 to present. There is also a zipped archive running 2007-2015.
ARAG (Geneva Airport Residents) has a Geneva Airport Movement Enquiries (GAME) database of flights at Geneva airport going back to 2008.
Planeboys DE is a German spotter site for Berlin airport. It has a flight movements database for Berlin’s airports starting from May 2003. The older archives are more patchy with years 2011-2013 missing.
DFLD is a German aircraft noise site with aircraft movements at various Austrian, German and Swiss airports. You can find aircraft registrations at Frankfurt airport from 14 Aug 2009 and Munich airport from 1 Nov 2010.
This site has flight a flight movement archive for Incheon Seoul airport from 2015 onwards.
Resource Notes
Thanks to reader Vladimir (April 2020) for info on Flightera, ARAG, Planeboys, Skystef.
During the update of this article in September 2024 we discovered the presence of a German forum (VielFliegerTreff) which has had a detailed thread on finding aircraft registrations since 2012. Firstly, we send hats off to these guys who are undoubtedly at the forefront of this field.
One main poster who also posts on English forums did half-jokingly claim we had lifted some of their resources for this article (first published in 2019) – that is actually not the case, we only found the forum in mid-September 2024 probably because we don’t speak much German!
For this updated version we have added DFLD, qth.net logs and the FlightAware registration URL archive method which were mentioned at VielFliegerTreff.
If you come unstuck with finding a registration you could make a request at the above forum as they may be able to help you. They list some other resources and also may have access to data not publicly available including the Libhomeradar files.
Other Flight Data Resources
There are some other places to find flight information. In various parts of the world local libraries may hold airport flight log records. Departing and arriving flights were also published in the newspapers of some cities.
Aircraft Photo Sites – This is a long-shot but there are some big aircraft photography sites where enthusiasts upload their images. Spotters tend to be around large airports every day so there is always a very small chance that someone may have taken a photo of an aircraft you were flying on. Uploads usually include the aircraft registration.
You can do an advanced search on either Airliners.net or JetPhotos.com putting in the date and airport you flew from. Obviously if you are flying out of an airline’s hub there will be many flights of that airline so distinguishing your aircraft will be more of a challenge.
Other photo sites to check are: airplane-pictures.net / planespotters.net
Airline Timetables – Going back decades it can be difficult to know the flight number and schedule of a particular flight you were on. It is perhaps possible to find the flight number and flight times from an old airline timetable. There is a healthy market for old airline memorabilia out there on ebay and other sites.
This Airline Memorabilia site run on the Blogger platform by a Portuguese enthusiast has a superb collection of airline timetables, leaflets, adverts, safety cards, fleet info and route maps.
Airline Timetable Images site also has an extensive image archive of many older timetables.
Flight log display sites – It can be worth searching the flight log display sites mentioned above as someone else who was on your flight may have already logged the flight. You could get the flight number and perhaps even the registration. AirFleets also has a FlightLog list.
Summary: Personal Flight History
In this article we have looked at how to collate your past historical flights. We have discussed flight tracker sites, flight log display tools and various techniques (easy and advanced) for finding flight numbers, schedules and aircraft registration.
By taking time to investigate the above resources you should able to get a significant amount of info about your own personal flight history. At the end of the day however, you will only be able to go so far with your search – there will always be flights where it will be very difficult to find any details.
- Last updated 24 September 2024.
- First published in October 2019 – the original English guide to finding your historical past flights.
- Links at AirTravelGenius.com may pay an affiliate commission.
