Flight tracker or flight log — which one do you actually want?

Type "flight tracker" into an app store and the results are a mess, because two unrelated categories answer to the same name.

The first kind shows you aircraft in the sky right now. The second kind keeps a record of the flights you personally have taken. They share a vocabulary and almost nothing else, and people routinely install one while wanting the other.

Here is the distinction, and a quick way to work out which side of it you're on.

The question each one answers

A flight tracker answers where is this aeroplane at this moment. It is a live instrument. You open it because a flight is in the air and you want to know something about it: whether it left, whether it's late, where it is over the Atlantic, what that thing overhead is.

A flight log answers where have I been. It is a record. You open it because you want to see your own history — how far you've flown, which countries you've landed in, what the accumulated shape of your travelling looks like.

The simplest test: does your question have a present tense? If it does, you want a tracker. If your question is about the past — yours, specifically — you want a log.

What trackers are genuinely excellent at

Flightradar24, FlightAware and the volunteer-run OpenSky Network are remarkable pieces of infrastructure. They take a signal every airliner broadcasts about itself, collect it through thousands of receivers, and turn it into a live picture of the world's air traffic that anyone can look at for free.

For their actual purpose they are unbeatable:

• Working out whether the flight you're collecting someone from has left yet
• Watching a delay develop in real time, usually before the airline admits to it
• Identifying the aircraft that just went over your garden
• Following a diversion, a go-around, or a storm re-routing an entire ocean's worth of traffic

None of this is what a logbook does, and a logbook would be terrible at all of it.

Where trackers stop

The limitation is structural rather than a missing feature. A flight tracker is organised around aircraft, not around people.

The signal an aeroplane broadcasts contains its identity, its position, its altitude and its heading. It contains nothing whatsoever about who is sitting in seat 24C. There is no technical route from "this aircraft flew from Lisbon to Vienna on the fourteenth" to "you were on it" — that connection exists only in your inbox and your memory.

Which produces the thing most people discover too late: nobody is keeping a record of your flying for you.

• Airlines keep your booking history, but only per airline, only while you use the same account, and often only for a few years.
• Loyalty programmes count qualifying flights — a deliberately narrower set than the flights you actually took, and they zero out or expire.
• Tracking sites hold historical data indexed by aircraft and flight number, not by passenger, and the deep archive is generally paywalled.

Your flying history is scattered across half a dozen systems, none of which is trying to assemble it, and all of which will eventually stop holding it.

What a log has to do that a tracker doesn't

A logbook has an awkward requirement a live tracker never faces: most of the flights it needs to hold have already happened. Sometimes years ago.

That forces a different design:

• Any date must work. If a tool can only record a flight while it's live, it is a tracker with a save button. Almost everything you want to record is in the past.
• A flight number cannot be required. You do not remember the flight number of a trip you took in 2017. You remember that you flew from Athens to Munich, roughly when, and that is genuinely enough to compute everything that matters.
• The distance has to be worked out for you. Two airport codes and a date should produce the great circle distance, the flying time, the countries and the continents — because the interesting numbers are the totals, and totals only exist if every entry is measured the same way.
• It has to work offline. The moment you are most likely to remember an old flight is on a plane, with the wifi off.

None of these are requirements a live tracker has, which is why apps that try to be both usually end up as a tracker with a poorly-attended history tab.

So which did you want?

If you came looking for departure boards and live aircraft, install a tracker. They are free and very good, and this is not an argument against them.

If what you actually wanted was to see everywhere you've been on one map, and to find out how far that adds up to, that's a logbook — and it's the one people tend to be looking for without having a name for it.

That is what Orbit is. You enter two airport codes and a date, going back as far as you can remember, and it computes the great circle distance, the hours, the countries and the continents from an offline database of 8,801 airports — then draws every route as an arc on a globe you can spin.

No live positions, no departure boards, nothing about aircraft that aren't yours. Just the record nobody else was keeping.

Related reading: how flight radar actually works and how to reconstruct every flight you've ever taken.