How to tell whether a plane is in an emergency on FlightRadar

Did you know that you can use FlightRadar to tell if there's an emergency on board a plane?

There are just some sites which people love spending time on for a bit of comfort browsing, like how legions of people can spend hours looking on RightMove at homes they'd never buy.

Another one of these sites is FlightRadar24, where you can partake in the soothing pastime of watching planes fly around the world.

Some people like to spend time on FlightRadar for fun while others use it at particular times such as the football transfer season to stalk players who may or may not be jetting off to other countries to complete deals.

The most-watched plane in the site's history is the one which took the body of Queen Elizabeth II from Edinburgh to London after she died, with about six million people trying to track the flight and crashing the site.

Of course some people abuse the site and use it to draw giant penises with the path of their flight, but for some FlightRadar fans that's part of the appeal.

There is a feature on the site which can also tell you whether a plane is warning that it's having an emergency and FlightRadar24 have explained what all the different colours mean.

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A blue plane is being tracked by satellite, while a yellow one is being monitored by a terrestrial receiver network, whatever that means.

However, if you ever spot a red plane on the site that means it's pinging out one of three major warnings about an emergency.

Planes have a whole load of codes they can send out with their transponder to signal that something's going on and code 7700 is the one for a general emergency.

FlightRadar can pick up when planes send out these codes and will mark a plane as red for emergency.

If you really want to know when this happens you can set up notifications on your app to buzz you when there's trouble.

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Planes have three main 'squawk' codes to transmit information about an emergency going on, so while 7700 is the general one to say something's gone wrong, it can encompass all sorts of things.

That code could mean something is up with the plane mechanically or perhaps that there's a medical emergency on board, basically if a plane is doing the 7700 code it means something has gone wrong and everyone needs to be aware of it.

Code 7600 means the plane has lost radio communication and can't contact whichever tower it's supposed to be talking to, informing ground crews that whatever's happening on the aircraft, it's unable to reply with words.

The one you really don't want to hear is code 7500, which means the plane is being hijacked and needs help ASAP.