Scotland

Planes over Edinburgh

At 11 km from Edinburgh, which lies to the west, you are under the approach and departure paths. Aircraft overhead are climbing out or on final descent — low, slow, and close enough to identify by eye on a clear day.

The airports that put aircraft over Edinburgh

AirportDistanceDirection
Edinburgh EDI11 kmwest
Glasgow GLA78 kmwest

Distances are straight-line from the centre of Edinburgh, calculated from published airport coordinates.

What NearestPlane displays around Edinburgh actually saw

Not a guess from a timetable. These are the airlines that came up most on NearestPlane displays within 35 km of Edinburgh over the last 30 days, across 34 displays and 11,738 individual sightings.

AirlineShare of sightings
easyJet19.8%
Ryanair17.5%
Jet26.0%
Loganair5.4%
BA Shuttle5.3%
Elite Air4.4%
BA CityFlyer3.8%
Ryanair UK3.7%

Aggregated across all displays in the area and rounded. No individual display, owner or location is identified, and the figures are only shown where enough displays contribute that none could be.

How to tell what is overhead

Above about 10,000 feet an airliner is a white shape and a contrail. You cannot read a tail from the ground, and the aircraft is gone before you have found it on a phone. Three ways round it, in order of effort:

A tracking appFree, and you have it already. The catch is that you have to open it, pan to yourself, and work out which of the dots is the one you heard.
A web mapBetter on a laptop, same problem: you go to it, rather than it telling you.
A display on the wallIt is already showing the nearest aircraft when you look up. Nothing to open, nothing to search.

What NearestPlane shows for Edinburgh

Set it to Edinburgh once from your phone and it shows the nearest aircraft continuously: the airline in its own brand colours, the route it is flying, its altitude, speed and how far away it is. Around 5,900 airlines are named automatically, so regional and charter operators are identified rather than left as a raw callsign.

It also names government, royal, military and emergency-service aircraft, and turns red when something within range squawks 7700, the general emergency code.

NearestPlane — £124.99, free UK delivery Hand-assembled in the UK. No subscription, ever. Over 3,000 in homes across more than 50 countries, rated 4.9 out of 5 on Trustpilot. See the display

Worth reading next

Why do planes fly over my house? · How high do planes fly? · Identify the plane above you · Plane spotting locations in the UK

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