How Flightinformation.com Tracks Flights With No App, No Cargo Planes, No Paywall

Flightinformation.com will not show you a military transport or a freighter, and that is the point. It is a tracking site that indexes passenger flights only, and puts each one on a single page: live status, gate history, delay history, historical flight paths, even what is playing on the in-flight entertainment. Type “london singapore” and every flight number on the route comes back at once.

Behind it is Westcoast Digital AB, a small team in Trollhättan on Sweden’s west coast that has been building web services since 2011 and collecting flight schedule data since 2015. It already runs FlightsFrom.com and Airportinformation.com. The new site enters a market defined by Flightradar24 — also Swedish — and a hundred apps called Flight Tracker, with no app of its own and no intention of building one.

Jens Johansson Ugglesjö, its CTO and co-founder of Quality Unlimited AB and Westcoast Digital AB, spoke to Locals Insider about competing on simplicity rather than coverage, why the flight history on some routes stops dead, how a free site pays its data licences, and what happens to a business built on visits when an AI answers the question before anyone clicks.

“Read ‘flight information’ instead of only ‘flight tracking’.”

From Programming and a Love of Flying to CTO of a Flight Data Site

My background is in programming and web, and I love flying, and I can call myself CTO at Flightinformation.com. We’re a small team with years of experience building websites with flight data. We are also behind the popular FlightsFrom.com and Airportinformation.com.

Why Build Another Flight Checker When Flightradar24 Already Exists

We wanted to make checking a flight feel simple and 100% focus on passenger flights. It’s not even possible to find military or cargo flights on Flightinformation.com.

Sometimes you just want to know when someone lands or where a flight goes, without having to learn your way around a tracking platform, together with useful information for a passenger. Read “flight information” instead of only “flight tracking”. We also made sure finding the flight in the first place is easy.

Who Actually Uses a Flight Information Site

We guessed the audience was less plane spotters and more people meeting someone at arrivals, or checking whether a route exists at all.

You are pretty spot on. We’re building it for passengers, people meeting someone at arrivals and people exploring routes. A common scenario is also people who have already booked their flight and want to find more information on the flight number they have on their booking. We can show things like delay history, historical flight paths and in-flight entertainment.

We also have a vast network of flight-related websites and missed the option to do live data.

“London Singapore”: The Search That Explains the Difference

The reason to stay is simplicity: finding the flight information you need with very little effort. It’s very easy to find a particular flight. You can just type in “london singapore” and all flight numbers on that route show up instantly.

But if you just want to follow the flight on the map, Flightradar24 and FlightAware for example are both great products. Our focus is making those everyday checks easy. We aggregate the live data with flight path history, delay history, gate history, on-board information and flight departure and arrival boards.

If it’s the apps you want to compare rather than the websites, our guide to the best flight tracker apps, paid and free covers the field.

Where the Live Data Comes From, and Why It Sometimes Fails

We aggregate multiple ADS-B sources — Wingbits is one of them — and you can update the flight board data at any time. The airline gate or flight status can go instantly or not; it mostly depends on the airport.

The most common data gaps are at certain airports during landing and take-off. Some airports have missing receivers. And in China, because of the restrictions they have there on receivers.

Wingbits, one of those sources, is itself a Swedish company: a Stockholm startup that pays people to run ADS-B receivers at home, with more than 4,000 active stations across over 100 countries.

Why the Flight History Stops Where It Does

We looked up EK110, Malta to Dubai via Larnaca, and the most recent flight the site showed was 15 February 2026 — not yesterday’s.

Right now it’s a technical thing that limits us to prioritise certain flights. We hope to have a daily history implemented soon. We have the data, we are just not recording everything. If you check QF2, London Heathrow to Singapore for example, you’ll see more recent flights.

Who Needs Flight History, and Why It Won’t Sit Behind a Paywall

The most common use for our visitors, besides delays and gates, is checking the historical airspace usage. There are too many conflicts right now and every Europe–Asia flight is affected because of this. Many users want to know what flight paths they can expect based on recent history.

Our goal is for full historical data without a paywall.

“Our goal is for full historical data without a paywall.”

Delay history has a practical use on the ground too: if a flight is late enough, a compensation claim may be worth filing, and evidence of the pattern helps.

One Company, Three Sites

Is Flightinformation.com related to Airportinformation.com?

Yes, Airportinformation.com and FlightsFrom.com are part of the same company. They cover airports, scheduled routes and live flights, and the plan is to connect those services more closely.

How a Free Flight Site Pays for Itself

Traffic matters, but so does keeping the cost of serving each visitor sensible. We have good experience and partners that help us with this, so we can afford the licences needed.

AI Answers, Google, and the Traffic Problem

Ask ChatGPT for a flight status today and it answers directly, sourced from sites like this one, and nobody clicks through.

Great question. AI answers put pressure on a business that depends on visits. Being quoted is useful, but our response is to make the live tools useful enough that people come directly and return.

You also need to try to be selective about what the AI agent can see or not. It’s a new landscape. I think a lot will happen in the coming years on how information is shared.

“Being quoted is useful, but our response is to make the live tools useful enough that people come directly and return.”

Why There’s No App, and Why That’s Deliberate

Someone checking a single flight shouldn’t have to install anything.

We’d rather put our effort into a good mobile website. An app might help with repeat use, but it isn’t our priority right now.

What a Flight Data CTO Checks Before Flying

Oh, I’m constantly checking my flight status. I’m almost obsessed. I use different flight tools to see how they compare.

I’m also an early-airport guy, so once I’m there, I want to know my gate. If it’s not on the departure board yet, I check the gate history on Flightinformation.com. It usually gives me a good hint about where to go. The same goes for delay history: what can I expect? Some flights just never seem to depart on time.

Before longer flights, I also tend to watch trip reports on YouTube featuring the same airline, aircraft type and cabin class.

For the hours before the gate is called, our guides to the best airport lounges in Europe and the gadgets worth packing for a long-haul flight cover the rest of the wait, and resetting your body clock afterwards is its own problem.

See our list of the top flight-tracking sites.