Tool

Live UK offshore helicopter tracking.

Track offshore crew-change helicopters across the UK Continental Shelf in near real time — North Sea, Irish Sea, and English Channel — including Aberdeen, Sumburgh, Norwich, and Humberside shuttle traffic, with live positions, operators, altitude, and flight trails.

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What it shows

Live positions for the rotorcraft types used on UKCS crew changes: Sikorsky S-92 and S-76, Airbus H175, H155, H225, and AS332, and Leonardo AW189, AW169, and AW139.
Operator inferred from the callsign, plus registration, altitude, groundspeed, and heading.
Flight trails for the past hour, fading with age, drawn straight onto the atlas alongside fields, wind farms, and infrastructure.
Traffic is filtered to UK waters and the main onshore heli bases, so police and air-ambulance flights over cities are excluded.

Offshore heli bases

Aberdeen (Dyce)The busiest offshore heliport in the UK, serving the central and northern North Sea. SumburghShetland base for the far northern North Sea and West of Shetland fields. NorwichSouthern North Sea gas field shuttles. HumbersideSouthern North Sea and offshore wind support. BlackpoolIrish Sea gas and offshore wind support.

Coverage and its limits

Positions come from ADS-B transmissions picked up by volunteer ground receivers. Reception is line-of-sight, so a helicopter cruising at 3,000 ft typically fades around 65 nm from the nearest receiver. Gaps in the middle of an offshore route are normal and expected, not a fault.

Rather than hiding that, the tracker keeps a faded aircraft on screen as a signal-lost entry. For up to five minutes after the last confirmed fix it shows a dead-reckoned estimate from that fix's track and groundspeed, drawn grey and hollow with an "est." label; after that it freezes on the last confirmed position, and drops the aircraft entirely after 45 minutes without a report. An estimate is never presented as a confirmed position.

Coverage is also thinner at weekends and overnight, because offshore crew-change shuttles fly mainly in weekday daylight hours.

Source and licence

Live aircraft positions come from adsb.lol, a community ADS-B aggregator, and are made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0. The same data is available from the atlas API at GET /api/helicopters.

Not for navigation, flight following, or operational use. This is a public-interest view of open ADS-B data, not an operational tracking service.