Especially since the July 4th flooding. There have been a lot of helicopters in the sky over my neighborhood and a lot of posts on NextDoor and Facebook asking, "Who is up there?" So here is a quick guide to finding out.
Planes and Helicopters
Start off by going to https://www.flightradar24.com/2025-08-05/22:44/20x/30.58,-97.96/14.
Where:
2025-08-05 is the date you saw the aircraft in year-month-day format.
22:44 is the time you saw it in 24-hour format and the UTC timezone (add 12 hours for PM times and another 5 hours for Central Daylight Time, summer, or 6 hours during Central Standard Time, winter)
20x is the zoom. 20x is a good starting point.
30.58,-97.96 is the GPS to center the map on. (This is my neighborhood.)
14 is the zoom level. 14 is a good start for things overhead. If you are looking closer to the horizon, you will probably want to go to 11, which shows a wider area.
Click the play button to see the animation. It then turns into the pause button.
Once you see a likely aircraft, hit pause. Click on the craft's icon for info about it.
You can then click on "Route" to view the entire flight path.
Entering the tail number (R20045 in this example) in the search probably will return nothing because it is a military helicopter. So I'm using N3010X instead to show what a non-military aircraft would yield.
Clicking on that results gets you the history of its recent flights and basic info.
Sometimes adsbexchange.com has better info, though it is not as user-friendly. The equivalent URL for it would be.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?replay=2025-08-05-22:46&lat=30.430&lon=-97.933&zoom=11.0
Clicking on the military helicopter provides a bit more information.
Clicking on FULL DETAILS provides more information.
