F-16 Fighting Falcon
ICAO F16The most widely exported fighter of the jet age. Fighters rarely transmit ADS-B, so sightings are occasional — here is what is visible now.
Flying right now
Live · 30s
No F-16 Fighting Falcon is transmitting ADS-B at the moment.
Military aircraft are not obliged to broadcast, so this happens regularly. The count refreshes every thirty seconds.
Airframe
- Manufacturer
- General Dynamics / Lockheed Martin
- Role
- Multirole fighter
- Class
- L1J — Landplane, 1 jet engine
- Crew
- 1, or 2 in the D and F models
- First flight
- 2 February 1974
- In service
- 1978
Operators airborne
Nothing of this type is up right now.
About the F-16 Fighting Falcon
More than 4,500 F-16s have been built and around twenty-five air forces still fly them, which makes the near-empty live count on this page surprising until you know why it happens.
Fighters are not required to transmit ADS-B the way civil traffic is, and most of the time they do not. What does appear here is largely European: several NATO air forces mandate ADS-B for peacetime flying in shared airspace, so Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Polish F-16s are visible far more often than American ones. Ferry flights and transits through civil airways are the other common case.
So treat this page as a record of the F-16 traffic that chooses to be seen. When the count is zero, that is not an outage — it is the normal condition of a fighter fleet.
Callsign prefixes
- BAF
- Belgian Air Force
- NAF
- Royal Netherlands Air Force
- DAF
- Royal Danish Air Force
- VIKING
- A recurring Norwegian block
How to recognise it
- —A single engine with a chin intake below the cockpit — no other Western fighter is laid out this way.
- —A bubble canopy with no forward frame, giving the pilot an uninterrupted view.
- —Cropped delta wing blended into the fuselage, and a single tall fin.
Common questions
+ Why are there no F-16s showing on the map?
Because fighters usually fly with ADS-B off. Nothing obliges a military aircraft to transmit, and most air forces only do so where civil airspace rules require it. A zero on this page is the expected reading most of the time.
+ Which F-16s do show up?
Mostly European. Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Poland fly in dense civil airspace where ADS-B is mandated, so their aircraft appear far more consistently than US ones. Ferry flights and transits are the other regular source.
+ Is the F-16 still being built?
Yes. Lockheed Martin builds the F-16 Block 70/72 in Greenville, South Carolina, with recent orders from Bahrain, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Taiwan and others. The line has now been running for over fifty years.