Earlier this month, FlightRadar24, a site that monitors live air traffic, announced a milestone linkup with EasyJet. It will provide live flight-tracking within the airline’s app.
EasyJet, Europe's second-largest budget carrier after Ryanair, is the world's first airline to deeply integrate live flight-tracking with FlightRadar24.
The deal highlights how airlines worldwide have not made true live flight-tracking a standard feature within airline-branded mobile apps. Travelers can get standard flight updates, but these are often not in real-tims. Delay alerts are themselves delayed.
So there's a huge market opportunity.
But the deal also prompts the question of how FlightRadar24 came to be one of the most dominant players in flight tracking.
Take a look at this Google Trends chart, which compares the search volumes among FlightAware, FlightRadar24, and FlightStats:
The Sweden-based team started nearly a decade ago with only two people. It has grown steadily to include 20 employees and a profit of $2.4 million in its last fiscal year. And that’s all without any external investment.
One area of strength is that far more airplanes in Europe are equipped with ADS-B transponders — around 80% comparted to 55% in America —giving it more detailed coverage in its home continent.
Another part of its secret sauce has been to iterate an interface that maintains a modern feel without losing any functionality. Compared with its competitors, the service offers a certain ease to consuming the various plane positions.
The company’s leanness means that it has a solid runway to continue improving its services, which (like other flight tracking services) rely on a base of volunteer enthusiasts.
These on-the-ground aviation geeks are sent antennae to track the automatic dependent surveillance broadcast, or ADS-B, which is an unencrypted signal that can be tracked within 150 miles of an aircraft’s position.
These devices are not without cost, coming it over $500 per installation. Nonetheless, this is a small overhead cost for an extensive network that then can be leverage into lucrative B2B contracts.
FlightRadar24 benefits from more than 8,000 receivers, whereas pioneer competitor FlightAware calls on nearly 4,500.
All of the major flight tracking services have built business models around providing premium accounts to dedicated hobbyists while also working to deliver more in-depth B2B products to airlines, airports (such as Dublin’s) and aviation suppliers. (FlightRadar24, like its competitors, also have some advertisements on its site.)
FlightRadar24 has won big with its easyJet integration, providing not only a solid case study for future airline integration but also setting an emerging expectation by travelers for live flight tracking within an airline’s app.
Yet, when compared to the many commercial services and advertising options offered by FlightAware, the company seems to focus primarily on its premium accounts and paid apps. It has made barely a mention of any B2B offerings.
As the company moves towards integrating with more suppliers, there should finally be a shift towards live flight tracking within more airport and airline support apps.
Meanwhile, FlightAware is also thriving. As long as four years ago, the company was reporting “millions” in sales and revenue growth of 40-75% a year. This year it announced a new network for tracking non-ADS-B-equipped aircraft, which might help it expand coverage.
Flight tracking is clearly a lucrative niche to exploit!
UPDATE Dec 18
FlightAware has offered the following comments on our article:
1) Indeed FlightRadar24 has nearly twice as many ADS-B receivers as us. However, that took them the better part of a decade to do that and we’ve grown our network to 4,500 over the last couple years alone. At our current growth rates, we’ll eclipse them next year. I’ve included a graph of our ADS-B growth. Additionally, they only receive air traffic control data from the FAA whereas FlightAware receives it from >50 countries across North America and Europe, which is far more comprehensive than ADS-B alone.
2) As it relates to their web site deal with EasyJet this year, it’s worth noting that while they’ve done that deal, we’ve signed over twenty new airlines this year alone to use FlightAware operationally (e.g., for flight following, predicting arrival times, etc), which is a much broader relationship. There was an article in Aviation Week earlier this year describing how all the major service providers (e.g., SITA, Rockwell Collins, etc) are now providing FlightAware data to their customers.
3) Like most private companies, we don’t disclose financials, but we did grow from 40 to 50 employees in the last year and are hiring for about a dozen positions now in Houston, New York, and London.