How to track flights and ships (AIS) together

Aircraft and ships broadcast their own positions, which is why you can watch them move in near real time. Planes send ADS-B; ships send AIS. The catch is that most tools show one or the other, so seeing both together, to understand traffic around a port or an incident at sea, usually takes setup. Below is how each works, and how Saorsa puts them on one map with the context that explains them. First, the fundamentals.

How flight tracking works (ADS-B)

Most aircraft transmit ADS-B: position, altitude, speed and callsign, roughly once a second. A ground network of receivers picks these up and plots them. Flightradar24 and FlightAware are the best known; ADS-B Exchange is popular because it is unfiltered, so it shows aircraft the others hide. Coverage is excellent over land and weak mid-ocean, where there are no receivers (satellite-based ADS-B fills some of that gap).

How ship tracking works (AIS)

Ships use AIS, a similar idea over VHF radio: position, heading, speed, and vessel identity. MarineTraffic and VesselFinder are the common tools. Coastal coverage from land stations is dense; open-ocean coverage depends on satellite AIS and updates less often. Note that not every vessel transmits, and some turn AIS off, so an empty patch of sea is not proof nothing is there.

Watching both at once

This is where it gets awkward, because the flight tools and the ship tools are separate products. The DIY route is to run your own receiver (a cheap SDR dongle plus software like dump1090 for ADS-B) and feed it into a map that also pulls an AIS feed. Simpler is to keep two tabs open and line them up by location and time. Or you use a product that already carries both: Saorsa pulls ADS-B and AIS in as live layers on the same map, so aircraft and vessels sit together without any setup.

The dots are not the story

Raw tracks answer "what is moving where". They do not answer "why", which usually means pulling in weather, notices and reports from the ground. Saorsa is built around exactly that: it combines flights and ships with weather, live satellite imagery and other data around a specific event, so the traffic shows up next to the thing that explains it. When a vessel behaves oddly or flights start diverting, you see the context, not just the marker.

Investigate it with other people

The other thing a lone map cannot do is let you work a situation out with others. On Saorsa you can pull a specific flight or ship straight into a discussion and investigate it as a community, which is how the interesting patterns, a fleet massing, a route suddenly avoided, actually get spotted. That combination of live data and shared investigation is what sets it apart from a single-purpose tracker.

The short version

For pure single-domain tracking, Flightradar24 and MarineTraffic are excellent. To see air and sea traffic together, with the weather and satellite context and a community investigating alongside you, that is what Saorsa is for. It is launching in stages on iOS and Android at saorsa.ai.