New data platform for the world's most popular flight tracker

Open Flightradar24 and you see every plane in the sky, moving in real time. Behind that map is one of the most remarkable data operations in consumer tech. More than 60 million people use the service every month. Its data comes from a community network of over 55,000 ADS-B receivers on all seven continents, combined with satellite data, multilateration, radar feeds and other sources, to track hundreds of thousands of flights every day.

And Flightradar24 owns that data the whole way: from the antenna on a volunteer's roof to the aircraft icon on your phone. The service started in Stockholm in 2006 as a side project by two aviation enthusiasts, opened its network to volunteer receivers in 2009, and has grown into one of the most used aviation services in the world.

The challenge. Our consultant arrived at an exciting moment. Flightradar24 wanted to rebuild its whole data platform. That means a platform that can ingest a constant stream of position messages from tens of thousands of sources, clean and merge them into one truth about where every aircraft is, serve it live to millions of users and keep years of history available for analysis and data products. All while the existing system keeps running, because the sky never closes.

What our consultant did. Our consultant spearheaded the project and focused on getting something real into the company’s hands fast, rather than disappearing into a long redesign. Shipping early let teams start using the new platform, give feedback and build on it while it grew.

Why it matters. A modern, well-modelled data platform is what everything else stands on: analytics, new product features, business data services and, increasingly, AI. Clean, owned, real-time data at global scale is exactly the kind of foundation AI-native products are built on.