The Swedish flight tracking tool, spun out of a price comparison portal, is tracking the travel chaos sparked by the US-Israel war on Iran in real time
M
ikael Robertsson and Olov Lindberg did not set out to build one of the pre-eminent monitors of global airspace. In a bid to draw more eyes to their Swedish flight price comparison portal, the entrepreneurs added a page charting air traffic.
That page became Flightradar24, the portal that people around the world now turn to when there is chaos – and drama – in the skies.
“Very soon this flight tracker … became more popular than the price comparison [tool] itself,” recalled Robertsson, who spoke to the Guardian from the firm’s office in Stockholm. In 2010, when the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano released a vast cloud of ash that grounded flights across Europe, millions turned to Flightradar24 to monitor flight movements (or lack thereof) in real time.
