Features
What the app actually does
A free live aircraft tracker for iPhone and iPad, built on the community-run airplanes.live receiver network. Here is the whole feature set, in plain terms.
The live map
The map is the product. Everything else hangs off it.
Unfiltered traffic
The map draws what the receiver network hears, not a curated subset of it. Military traffic, aircraft enrolled in the FAA's LADD privacy programme, and aircraft flying under a temporary Privacy ICAO Address all appear like anything else.
Altitude colouring and real silhouettes
Aircraft are coloured by altitude, so a departure stream and an overflight separate at a glance, and drawn with type-specific silhouettes rather than one generic icon. Flight trails show where each one has been.
Search that matches how aircraft are named
Find an aircraft by callsign (AAL2956), by registration
(N123AB), or by its 24-bit ICAO hex address
(A1B2C3). The hex address is the identifier that stays
with the airframe even when the callsign changes every leg.
Cartography drawn for the hour
Separate light and dark basemaps, each drawn on purpose rather than dimmed after the fact, and rendered on our own servers from OpenStreetMap data. No third-party tile provider ever sees a request from your device.
Weather and imagery
Context for why traffic is doing what it is doing.
NOAA MRMS radar
Live weather radar underneath the traffic, as the latest frame or animated through recent history. When an arrival stream bends thirty miles wide of the airport, the reason is usually right there on the map.
GOES satellite cloud imagery
Satellite cloud cover as a second overlay, for the systems radar cannot see: high cirrus, marine layer, and the shape of a front well beyond radar range.
IFR and VFR charts
Aeronautical charts as map layers: VFR sectionals for airspace, terrain and airport detail, and IFR charts for the airway structure traffic is actually following.
Radar and satellite imagery are observations, not forecasts, and they arrive with the latency of the source. Nothing in the app is suitable for flight planning or for weather decisions. See the terms of use.
ATC scope mode
A controller-style view of the same data, for when you want numbers instead of pictures.
Scope mode replaces the pictorial map with targets and data blocks. Each block carries the callsign, flight level, a climb or descent arrow, groundspeed and aircraft type. Those are the same fields, in roughly the same arrangement, that a radar display puts next to a target. Convergence flagging highlights pairs that are closing, and the emergency squawks 7500, 7600 and 7700 are called out on the target itself.
It is a spotter's view built from public broadcasts. It is not a safety system, it has no access to controller intent or clearances, and it must never be used as one. What the emergency squawk codes mean.
Knowing what you are looking at
A hex code is not an answer. Tapping a target should be.
Every aircraft opens to a detail sheet with its registration, type and registered operator, a photograph of the actual airframe where one exists, and the origin and destination for the flight number it is operating. Photographs come from planespotters.net and remain the property of their photographers; route lookups come from adsbdb.com. Both are relayed through our own backend, so those services see our server rather than your device.
Watchlists and alerts
Because the interesting thing rarely happens while you are holding the phone.
Takeoff and landing alerts
Follow specific aircraft by hex code and get a push notification when one departs or arrives, whether or not the app is running.
Proximity alerts
Draw a circle around a place that matters to you and be told when traffic enters it. The label you give that place never leaves your phone; our server only ever holds an unnamed circle.
Squawk 7700 alerts
A notification the moment any aircraft in view of the network broadcasts the general emergency code. Most of them land uneventfully, which is worth knowing before you assume otherwise.
History and replay
Live is only half of it.
Every aircraft carries its historical trace, so you can pull up where it has been rather than only where it is. Timelapse mode replays a slice of time across the whole map: an airport turning around a bank of arrivals, a holding stack building and unwinding through a line of storms, or a single aircraft's track reconstructed after the fact. It is the same data the live map uses, wound back.
The GPS interference map
A map of somewhere the satellites are not working.
Aircraft continuously broadcast how accurate they believe their own navigation position to be. When GNSS is jammed or spoofed, that figure collapses, and because thousands of aircraft are broadcasting it at once, the collapse is mappable. The app carries a live GNSS interference map built from those reports, and the same map is on the web at /jamming.
How aircraft reveal GPS jamming without ever being told about it.
Also on the web
Two of these run in a browser, with no app required.
- The live map shows the same unfiltered traffic, in a browser.
- The GNSS interference map covers worldwide GPS interference, updated continuously rather than once a day.
It doesn't watch you back
This is a feature, and it was designed in rather than bolted on.
No accounts. No analytics. No advertising, and no third-party advertising or attribution SDKs. Our servers keep no request logs: not your IP address, and not which part of the map you were looking at. Your device's location is used on the device and is never transmitted to us. Even the map tiles and the weather imagery come from our own infrastructure, so there is no tile provider watching either. The privacy policy spells out the single exception (push notifications need a record while they are switched on) and it is unusually short.
Free and Pro
The unfiltered map is free, permanently. Pro adds the extras.
Free
- The full unfiltered live map
- Aircraft details, photos and routes
- Search by callsign, registration or hex
- No ads, ever
Pro
- Live weather radar
- ATC scope mode and convergence alerts
- Advanced filters and unlimited watchlist
- Push alerts, free for active feeders
The App Store listing and the purchase screen inside the app are the authoritative statement of what each tier includes. Subscriptions are sold and billed by Apple; the terms of use cover the details.
Feeders fly free
If you run a receiver that feeds the airplanes.live network, Pro is yours at no charge for as long as it keeps feeding. You're the reason the data exists. Charging you for it would be strange.
