A live flight tracker powered by the community-run airplanes.live receiver network. Unlike other trackers, it shows everything the network sees: airliners, general aviation, helicopters, and the military and privacy-flagged traffic other apps remove.
Free on the App Store · iPhone and iPad · iOS 17 or later
Most trackers quietly filter their maps. This one shows what the network receives.
Military, LADD and privacy-flagged aircraft are shown, not suppressed. Altitude colouring, type-specific silhouettes, flight trails, and search by callsign, registration or hex.
NOAA/NWS radar under the traffic, animated or latest-frame, so you can see the weather aircraft are flying around as it happens.
Controller-style data blocks on every target (callsign, flight level, climb or descent, groundspeed, type), plus convergence flagging and 7500/7600/7700 highlighting. A spotter's view, not a safety system.
Tap any aircraft for a photograph, its origin and destination, type and registered operator.
Get a notification when an aircraft you follow takes off, or when anything squawks 7700, whether or not the app is open.
Purpose-drawn light and dark cartography, rendered on our own servers. Not a dimmed daytime map.
Actual screens, not mockups.
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.
The unfiltered map is free, permanently. Pro adds the extras.
No accounts, no advertising, no trackers, no third-party analytics. Nothing here reports you to Google, Meta, or anyone else. Our servers never log your IP address, and never the part of the map you were looking at. Your location stays on your device. Even the map tiles and weather come from our own infrastructure, so no tile provider sees you either. The details are in the privacy policy, and they are unusually short.
How the technology behind flight tracking actually works, written to be correct first and interesting second.
Aircraft announce their own position, unencrypted, twice a second. The two radio links, what's inside a message, and why the altitude isn't the height.
An emergency squawk is a request for priority, not a prediction of an accident. What happens on the ground the instant it appears.
One small number in every ADS-B broadcast turns thousands of airliners into an accidental worldwide sensor network.
Free on the App Store, for iPhone and iPad running iOS 17 or later.