Thomas Cook flight tracker: why there are no flights left to track

Thomas Cook Airlines stopped flying in the early hours of 23 September 2019, when the Thomas Cook group collapsed after 178 years in the travel business. Every aircraft was grounded overnight, the booking systems were switched off and the fleet was later returned to lessors or sold. There are no Thomas Cook flights in the sky today, which is why this page no longer shows a live radar. Instead, you will find the full story of the company here: how a one day temperance outing in the East Midlands grew into one of the most famous names in world travel, why it all came to an end, and which airlines now fly the routes that Thomas Cook left behind.

Looking for a flight that used to be Thomas Cook?

Many former Thomas Cook routes are now flown by other holiday airlines. To follow today’s holiday flights live, use the flight tracker or go straight to the tracker pages for TUI, easyJet and Ryanair. Arrival and departure boards for every major British airport are on our airports pages.

From a shilling excursion to a global brand

The story began on 5 July 1841, when a 32 year old cabinet maker and temperance campaigner named Thomas Cook organised a railway excursion from Leicester to Loughborough. Around 500 passengers paid a shilling each for the return trip and a day of speeches, tea and brass band music. Cook had negotiated the fare with the Midland Counties Railway on behalf of the whole group, and in doing so he invented something that would outlive him by more than a century: the packaged, pre-arranged group trip sold at a price ordinary working people could afford.

Through the 1840s and 1850s Cook expanded from local temperance outings to commercial excursions across Britain, then to the continent. His first foreign tour took travellers to Belgium, Germany and France in 1855. Egypt and the Nile followed, then America. In 1872 the firm ran its first round the world tour, 222 days for 200 guineas, a journey that helped inspire the era’s fascination with global travel. By the time Thomas Cook died in 1892, the company run with his son John Mason Cook was booking steamship berths, rail tickets and hotels across the world, issuing its own travellers’ cheques and organising transport for governments as well as tourists.

The twentieth century turned the family firm into an institution. Thomas Cook & Son passed through several owners, was nationalised by the British government in 1948 as part of the railway settlement, and returned to private hands in 1972. In 1992 the business was bought by the German bank WestLB together with the charter airline LTU, and in 2001 it became part of the German travel group C&N Touristic, which renamed itself Thomas Cook AG. The brand was simply too well known to discard.

The airline years

Thomas Cook Airlines in its final form appeared in 2003, when the group’s British charter carrier JMC Air was rebranded to carry the company name. From its main base at Manchester Airport, with further operations at Gatwick, Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Stansted and other UK airports, the airline flew holidaymakers to the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands, Egypt, Turkey, the Caribbean and the United States. The long haul network grew steadily, with Airbus A330 aircraft flying to Orlando, Cancun, Las Vegas and the Caribbean, while a large fleet of Airbus A321s covered the short and medium haul beach routes.

In 2007 Thomas Cook AG merged with the British operator MyTravel Group to form Thomas Cook Group plc, listed in London. At its peak the group served around 20 million customers a year, employed more than 20,000 people and operated airlines in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia and Spain. Its German sister airline Condor, another famous holiday name, was part of the same family. The airline was consistently one of the larger charter operators at British airports, and for many families in the North of England and Scotland the Sunday morning Thomas Cook departure to Palma or Tenerife was the real start of the summer holiday.

The near miss of 2011 and the Sunny Heart years

The collapse of 2019 was not the first brush with disaster. In late 2011 the group came within days of running out of cash and had to be rescued by its banks with an emergency loan, a moment that wiped most of the value off the shares and put the company on front pages for all the wrong reasons. A new management team led by Harriet Green cut costs hard, closed hundreds of shops, sold aircraft and businesses, and by 2013 had restored enough confidence to relaunch the whole group under a single symbol, the grey and yellow Sunny Heart, which replaced the separate liveries of the group’s airlines. For a few years the recovery looked convincing, and the shares recovered strongly.

The underlying weakness never went away, though. The rescue and the restructuring had been financed with yet more borrowing, so the group carried its debt into every difficult season that followed. When trading turned down again in 2018 and 2019 there was no cushion left, and this time the banks were no longer willing to bridge the gap.

23 September 2019: the collapse

The end came suddenly for passengers, but the pressures had been building for years. The 2007 merger left the group carrying a heavy debt burden that it never managed to shake off, even in good years, and servicing that debt consumed the profit from millions of package holidays. Around £1.7 billion of debt was still on the books in 2019. At the same time the high street travel agency model, with hundreds of shops on British high streets, was losing ground to online booking, and the group was slow to shrink its store estate. The exceptionally hot British summer of 2018 persuaded many customers to stay at home late in the season, uncertainty around Brexit weakened both bookings and the pound, and fuel costs rose. Each problem was survivable on its own; together they were not.

Through the summer of 2019 the group negotiated a rescue led by its largest shareholder, the Chinese conglomerate Fosun, which was prepared to inject new money alongside the banks and bondholders. In the final days the lenders demanded an extra £200 million standby facility on top of the roughly £900 million already agreed. The money could not be found, and government support was refused. In the early hours of Monday 23 September 2019 Thomas Cook Group entered compulsory liquidation. All flights were cancelled with immediate effect, aircraft were grounded wherever they stood, shops did not open, and around 21,000 employees worldwide, about 9,000 of them in the United Kingdom, lost their jobs overnight.

Operation Matterhorn: the largest peacetime repatriation in British history

When the company failed, roughly 600,000 customers were abroad on Thomas Cook holidays, including more than 150,000 British travellers. The Civil Aviation Authority had quietly prepared for this possibility under the codename Operation Matterhorn, and on the morning of the collapse it launched what became the largest peacetime repatriation in British history. Aircraft were chartered from airlines all over the world, from British Airways and easyJet to Wamos and Malaysia Airlines, and painted-over widebodies appeared at holiday airports across the Mediterranean.

Over the following two weeks the operation flew well over 140,000 people back to the United Kingdom on more than 700 flights, returning the vast majority on the day their original flight would have departed. The airlift cost roughly £83 million, met largely by the ATOL protection scheme and the government. For all the disruption, the operation is still regarded as a remarkable logistical achievement, and it demonstrated why the ATOL scheme exists: package holiday customers were brought home and their advance payments were refunded through the scheme in the months that followed.

What happened to the pieces

The famous name did not stay dead for long, although the airline did. The main developments after the collapse:

The brand. Fosun bought the Thomas Cook name and web addresses from the liquidators for £11 million and relaunched Thomas Cook in September 2020 as a purely online travel agent selling other companies’ flights and hotels. The new company is a fraction of the old group’s size and operates no aircraft of its own.

The shops. Hays Travel, an independent agency from Sunderland, bought all 555 former Thomas Cook high street shops and re-employed thousands of former staff, one of the more hopeful stories to come out of the collapse.

Condor. The German sister airline never stopped flying. It was kept aloft with a bridging loan from the German state development bank, was later taken over by the investment firm Attestor, and continues to fly holidaymakers from German airports today.

The aircraft. The roughly 30 strong British fleet of Airbus A321s and A330s was dispersed to lessors and found new operators around the world. Several former Thomas Cook A321s still fly from British airports in other airlines’ colours, so you may well have flown on one without knowing it.

The routes and slots. The gap in the holiday market was filled quickly. Jet2holidays expanded sharply from the northern airports that had been Thomas Cook strongholds, TUI picked up capacity and hotel contracts, and easyJet and Ryanair added leisure routes. Take off and landing slots at Gatwick and Bristol were bought by easyJet, with others going to Jet2.

Tracking the airlines that replaced Thomas Cook

If you used to watch a Thomas Cook flight bring family home from Alicante or Dalaman, the same journey today is most likely operated by TUI Airways, Jet2, easyJet or Ryanair. All of them can be followed in real time on this site. The live flight tracker shows every aircraft in view over the United Kingdom and lets you look up any flight worldwide; the airline pages highlight a single carrier and dim the rest, and each airport page combines a local radar with live arrival and departure boards. Manchester, the old Thomas Cook heartland, remains one of the busiest holiday airports in the country.

Frequently asked questions

Can I still track old Thomas Cook flights? No. Live radar shows aircraft that are actually flying, and Thomas Cook Airlines has not operated since 23 September 2019. Historic flight data for the airline exists in archives, but there is nothing live to display.

Is Thomas Cook still a company? Yes, but a very different one. The name was bought by Fosun and relaunched in 2020 as an online travel agent. It sells holidays operated by other airlines and hotel groups, and it does not own or operate aircraft.

Which airline took over my old route? There was no single successor. Jet2, TUI, easyJet and Ryanair each took over parts of the network. Check the arrival and departure boards of your local airport on our airports pages to see who flies your route today.

Did customers get their money back? Package holiday customers were protected by the ATOL scheme, which refunded advance bookings and paid for the repatriation of those already abroad. Flight-only customers without ATOL cover had to claim through their card issuer or travel insurance.

What happened to the Thomas Cook planes? They were returned to their owners and leased out again. Many of the A321s fly for European carriers today, and some of the A330s went on to fly long haul for airlines elsewhere in the world.