Lancashire
At 21 km from Blackpool, away to the west, most aircraft overhead are in the middle of a climb or descent — a few thousand feet up, often still turning onto or off the airway. High enough that the airline is a guess without something telling you.
| Airport | Distance | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Blackpool BLK | 21 km | west |
| Liverpool John Lennon LPL | 49 km | south |
| Manchester MAN | 54 km | south-east |
| Leeds Bradford LBA | 69 km | east |
Distances are straight-line from the centre of Preston, calculated from published airport coordinates.
Not a guess from a timetable. These are the airlines that came up most on NearestPlane displays within 35 km of Preston over the last 30 days, across 66 displays and 22,582 individual sightings.
| Airline | Share of sightings |
|---|---|
| easyJet | 16.2% |
| Ryanair | 13.4% |
| Jet2 | 6.1% |
| BA Shuttle | 5.3% |
| Loganair | 3.7% |
| British Airways | 2.9% |
| Ryanair UK | 2.7% |
| Delta | 2.2% |
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.
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:
Set it to Preston 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 displayWhy do planes fly over my house? · How high do planes fly? · Identify the plane above you · Plane spotting locations in the UK