fr24

What it is and what it does

fr24 is a Python client for Flightradar24's gRPC API that fetches real-time and historical flight data—including live feeds within geographic bounds, aircraft tracking, flight status, and detailed aircraft information. It uses asynchronous programming to handle concurrent requests efficiently and supports multiple output formats (protobuf, dictionary, Polars dataframe) plus file-based caching via platformdirs. The library comes with minimal core dependencies but offers optional extras for dataframe I/O (polars) and a command-line interface.

The package is designed for developers building aviation data applications, research tools, or monitoring systems that need structured access to Flightradar24's data without relying on deprecated JSON endpoints. It handles gRPC protocol details internally, exposing a clean async API. As of May 2026, Cloudflare bot protection with TLS fingerprinting requires gRPC—the library's primary transport—making it the supported path forward for programmatic access.

Use it for:

• Monitor real-time aircraft positions and flight status within specific geographic regions for air traffic analysis.
• Build historical flight tracking dashboards by caching live feed snapshots and querying them later with Polars.
• Retrieve detailed flight information (origin, destination, aircraft type, callsign) for a specific live flight.
• Export flight data to Parquet or CSV for downstream analysis in data pipelines or research workflows.
• Query the most viewed flights or nearest aircraft within a radius for real-time aviation monitoring applications.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

fr24 retrieves real-time and historical flight data from Flightradar24 using gRPC, supporting live feeds, flight tracking, status updates, and detailed aircraft information.

Yes. fr24 is actively maintained, has low install friction, no known vulnerabilities, and provides the only supported path to Flightradar24 data after JSON API deprecation. Install it if you need programmatic access to flight data; be aware you'll need valid Flightradar24 credentials and should review the legal notice regarding data usage restrictions.

Install

fr24 on PyPI

pip install fr24

uv add fr24

poetry add fr24

Installing fr24

Before you install

Low install friction with six runtime dependencies. Actively maintained with recent commits and no known vulnerabilities. Supports Python 3.9 through 3.14.

License in practice

MIT license permits free use, modification, and redistribution with minimal restrictions—suitable for commercial and open-source projects.

Quickstart

import asyncio
from fr24 import FR24, BoundingBox

async def main():
    async with FR24() as client:
        bbox = BoundingBox(south=42, north=52, west=-8, east=10)
        result = await client.live_feed.fetch(bbox)
        print(result.to_dict())

asyncio.run(main())

Requires Flightradar24 subscription key and token (via environment variables or explicit configuration); as of 2026-05-01, JSON APIs are no longer supported due to Cloudflare bot protection.

Verify before relying

• Whether Cloudflare bot protection affects reliability or requires authentication beyond what the library handles
• Performance characteristics under high-frequency polling or concurrent request loads
• Whether gRPC endpoint availability or rate limits are documented

Package facts

Evidence: fr24-0.3.1-py3-none-any.whl

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