Frequent accidents of civil aircrafts that occur due to suddenly changing environmental conditions require their reliable tracking in real time. This circumstance dictates the need for further improvement of tracking systems of civil aircraft in flight. Flight control in the future can be carried out using unmanned carriers, as well as spacecrafts. The most important state of the aircraft’s own thermal radiation, in which its infrared visibility is assessed, is the state of equilibrium self-radiation. Unlike civilian ships, in the military sphere it is important to hide aircraft flights from enemy observation equipment. The question of determining the detection distance of modern aircraft is considered, taking into account such factors as radiation contrast, the radiance of the object and background, radiation fluxes, the transmission coefficient of the optical part of the detector, the bandwidth of the atmosphere. The task of minimizing the detection distance of combat aircraft in the infrared range has been formulated. As a result of solving the problem in integral and non-integral formulations, design expressions for calculating the optimal values of the detection distance were obtained.