Many NATO military aircraft broadcast ADS-B during routine surveillance and patrol flights, and they do so deliberately. Public trackers regularly show RC-135 signals-intelligence aircraft, RQ-4 Global Hawk drones, P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, E-3 AWACS early-warning planes and KC-135 or A330 MRTT tankers orbiting over Poland, the Baltic states, Romania and the international waters of the Black Sea. What you will not see are fighters on a combat mission or strike packages. This guide explains why, how to recognize the typical flight patterns, and what a track alone can never tell you.
Which military aircraft broadcast ADS-B, and why?
ADS-B is a system in which an aircraft announces its own satellite-derived position, altitude, speed and identity on 1090 MHz. It was built for civil aviation safety and is effectively standard in Europe's controlled airspace. A large military aircraft that spends hours in the same airspace as airliners — a tanker, a transport, a reconnaissance platform — transmits for the same reason they do: so that air traffic control and other aircraft know where it is.
There is a second reason: visibility is sometimes the point. A patrol along the Alliance's eastern flank is meant to be seen — by allies, by the public and by the other side. A reconnaissance aircraft broadcasting its position over Romania gives away nothing a Russian radar would not see anyway; what it does is make NATO's presence in the region plain. The aircraft that appear most often on trackers are therefore:
- signals-intelligence aircraft such as the RC-135 and its counterparts in other air forces, which collect radar and communications emissions — the ELINT and SIGINT domain;
- high-altitude drones, above all the RQ-4 Global Hawk, flying orbits over the Black Sea that last most of a day;
- maritime patrol aircraft such as the P-8 Poseidon, which track surface ships and submarines;
- airborne early-warning aircraft — the E-3 AWACS, whose radar watches air traffic hundreds of kilometers out;
- tankers (KC-135, A330 MRTT) and transports (C-17, C-130), the logistics behind every operation.
When an aircraft carries an older transponder that sends no position, the receiver network can still locate it with MLAT by comparing when the signal reaches several stations. Accuracy is lower and the track looks jagged. The technique is covered in more depth in how ADS-B works.
Why are fighters and strike packages invisible?
A fighter on a combat mission has no reason to announce its position. As a rule it transmits only while transiting civilian airspace — from its base to a patrol area, for example — and switches the transponder off once the mission proper begins. Strike aircraft, helicopters and most aircraft operating over the war zone itself behave the same way. An "empty" map over Ukraine or the Black Sea therefore does not mean an empty sky; it means that whatever is flying there does not want to be seen. The full list of reasons aircraft stay off trackers is in why planes disappear from radar, and what a tracker shows during a violation of NATO airspace is covered in drones over Poland.
What patterns do you see over the Black Sea?
The signature shape is the elongated loop known as a racetrack: the aircraft flies tens of kilometers in one direction, turns, and flies back along the same line, for hours on end. Over the Black Sea these orbits usually sit in international airspace off the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria — outside the reach of the air defenses on occupied Crimea, but within reach of the aircraft's own sensors. A Global Hawk can hold such an orbit for most of a day; a crewed RC-135 for several hours, often with aerial refueling in between.
Those flights connect to the rest of the theater. Black Sea surveillance is the context for events visible on the Russia–Ukraine war map: strikes on ports, naval drone attacks and air activity over southern Ukraine. It is not a causal link, though — a reconnaissance orbit is flown whether or not anything happens that day.
What patterns do you see over the Baltic and Poland?
In the north the picture is more scattered. Patrol and reconnaissance aircraft work the Gulf of Finland, the Baltic between Sweden and the Baltic states, and the airspace around the Kaliningrad exclave — always outside its borders. Over Poland and Lithuania you are more likely to see tankers in fixed refueling tracks, which are regular loops at cruising altitude that other aircraft briefly join, and E-3 AWACS orbits. C-17 transports shuttling to Rzeszów-Jasionka airport were for years the most visible piece of the logistics behind aid to Ukraine. Incidents such as the drone incursions into Polish airspace in September 2025 change the picture for a few hours: extra tankers and early-warning aircraft appear, and civilian traffic disappears from closed sectors.
How do you read an aircraft's track on a tracker?
- Shape. An elongated loop at constant altitude is a surveillance orbit or a refueling track. A straight line from base to base is transport. Short, irregular loops around an airfield are training or approaches.
- Altitude and speed. A Global Hawk flies high and slow, a tanker at a typical cruising altitude, a maritime patrol aircraft can drop very low over the water.
- Callsign. Often informative, but it changes between missions and should not be treated as a name; the same airframe has flown under many callsigns.
- Position source. An ADS-B track is smooth; an MLAT track jumps and has gaps. That is a measurement limit, not a maneuver.
- Context. Check what is happening at the same time on the Russia strikes map and in Ukraine — but remember that the track itself says nothing about the mission.
Our live aircraft and ship tracker merges several public ADS-B and MLAT networks, which is why the same aircraft can appear with different precision along its route. If you want to compare services, see our review of the top flight-tracking sites and apps.
What a track does not say — and how not to over-read it
A track tells you where an aircraft was and how it flew. It does not tell you what it collected, what it looked at or whether it was looking for anything. Surveillance flights run on a schedule and are not reactions to individual events unless military sources say otherwise. Callsigns and registrations say nothing about the crew. Satellite imagery, which could complete the picture, is a separate discipline — IMINT — where date and context matter more than a single frame.
There is also a question of responsibility. The OSINT community has long kept to a simple rule: do not publish real-time conclusions about an aircraft's mission, or compilations that could help someone locate it while it is working. ADS-B lets you see that NATO is patrolling its eastern flank, and that is enough. How we handle air-traffic and event data is described in our methodology and data sources.
Key takeaways
- Large NATO reconnaissance, patrol, early-warning and tanker aircraft usually broadcast ADS-B because they fly in civilian airspace and are meant to be seen; fighters and strike packages do not.
- Over the Black Sea the signature is a multi-hour orbit off Romania and Bulgaria; over the Baltic it is patrols around the Gulf of Finland and refueling tracks over Poland.
- Shape, altitude and smoothness of a track reveal the type of flight; callsigns change, and a track never reveals the mission.
- Do not publish mission conclusions in real time.