About

Flight Follower reconstructs real aviation incidents from air traffic control recordings. We take the original radio audio, place the aircraft on a map, and synchronise its movement to the recording — so you can follow what happened geographically while hearing the people involved work through it.

What we cover

Declared emergencies, runway incursions, midair collisions and near misses, military intercepts, engine failures, medical diversions and weather encounters. Civil and military, from the 1980s to last week. The archive grows with almost every upload.

Where the audio comes from

Recordings are sourced from publicly available air traffic control archives and from investigation records released by bodies including the NTSB, FAA, AAIB, TSB and ATSB. Investigation dockets and government reports are public record. The reconstruction, the animation, the research and the written accounts are our own work.

How a reconstruction is made

Every reconstruction starts from two independent records of the same flight: the aircraft’s ADS-B track (its recorded position, altitude and speed) and the air traffic control audio. The two are placed on a single timeline in UTC, so each radio call lines up with where the aircraft actually was when it was spoken.

• Stitching the radio. An incident often spans several frequencies — ground, tower, approach, center. We join those recordings into one continuous timeline, following the aircraft from one controller to the next. Where the recordings disagree on time, or there is a gap in coverage, we flag it rather than paper over it.
• Checking the transcript. Speech-to-text gives a first draft; a person then reviews it line by line against the audio. Callsigns, registrations and airport names are never changed automatically — a wrong callsign is exactly how an error ends up in a published account, so those are only ever corrected by hand.
• Attributing each transmission. Each line is labelled as the controller, the incident aircraft or another aircraft. Where that is uncertain, it stays unlabelled rather than guessed.
• Checking the facts. Aircraft type, registration, date, location and outcome are cross-checked against the investigation record (NTSB, AAIB, TSB, ATSB and others), the FAA registry and contemporary reporting before an article is published.

The written article is then built around what that combined record shows: what happened, in what order, what the investigators found, and what the case teaches.

How we handle it

• No graphic imagery and no wreckage footage.
• Procedure and documented findings, never speculation about cause before an investigation concludes.
• Where an official probable cause exists, we report what it says rather than our own view.

This is aviation safety journalism, not disaster content. That is why the audience skews older and why we treat every recording as the record of a real day in real people's lives.

Contact

Partnership and press enquiries: contact@flightfollower.net
YouTube: @FlightFollower · Instagram: @flight.follower