Aircraft emergencies, tracked live — by aircraft type

Live 3D map of every aircraft currently squawking 7700, worldwide — red planes, flown trails colored by altitude. Drag pans, ctrl-drag rotates and tilts, pinch and two-finger twist on phones. Positions from adsb.lol, updated every 30 seconds with dead reckoning in between; US-registered airframes are enriched from the FAA registry on hover.

Emergencies by airline

Raw counts naturally favor the biggest operators — more flights, more chances for a diversion. The right-hand column normalizes each airline against its share of the flights we actually track (its callsigns in our rolling route table), shown only where we've tracked at least 300 of that airline's flights. Charters, air-ambulance, and government callsigns are included when they squawk; private/GA aircraft without airline-style callsigns are excluded from this table.

Boeing, Airbus, military, or something smaller?

The same archive rolled up by maker. Two caveats: raw counts mostly mirror the world fleet (there are far more A320s and 737s aloft than anything else), and the military share is inflated by design — trainers and fighters practice emergency procedures, and their 7700s land in the same public feed as a genuine airliner diversion.

Aircraft with more than one emergency

Same physical airframe (by registration), more than one 7700 in the archive window. A repeat is usually an unresolved squawk-box or recurring technical issue — or simple coincidence — not a verdict on the aircraft.

Routes where emergencies happened

Route resolved from the flight's filed callsign where our route table has it.

Is there paperwork afterward?

Mostly, no — and that surprises people. Squawking 7700 is a radio setting, not a legal filing: it tells controllers "give this aircraft priority," and the vast majority of these events — medical diversions, a pressurization precaution, a burning-smell-in-the-cabin turnback — end with a safe landing, an internal airline report, and nothing public. In the US, the NTSB opens a public investigation only for accidents and a narrow list of serious incidents (49 CFR 830); Europe's national investigation branches work the same way under EASA rules. Airlines do file mandatory occurrence reports with their regulators, but those systems (the FAA's databases, Europe's ECCAIRS) are not public per-event.

What does exist publicly: the small subset of events that become formal investigations shows up weeks-to-months later in the NTSB's CAROL database or a national AAIB's bulletins, searchable by registration and date. Pilots also file voluntary, anonymized reports to NASA's ASRS, which are published stripped of identifying detail. And aviation journalism — most famously The Aviation Herald — reconstructs many incidents from official statements and passenger accounts. We deliberately archive the registration and date for every event here precisely so any later filing can be matched to it.

How is this data collected?

A watcher polls global ADS-B coverage (via adsb.lol) every minute for aircraft squawking 7700 and archives each event — type, registration, callsign, and a minute-by-minute position path. An hourly enrichment job then fetches the full day's trace for freshly ended events, recovering the takeoff time, touchdown moment, the complete flight path including the pre-emergency portion, and an outcome (landed vs. signal lost — we never guess beyond what the data shows). Collection began on the date shown above and runs continuously; upstream sources publish no history, so there is no retroactive backfill and the archive only grows forward. Live emergencies appear on the interactive map as they happen.