Overflight

Identify every aircraft in your sky

A live radar scope of the sky you can see, on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. Each aircraft is identified in full: airline, flight number, route, aircraft type, altitude, speed, and which way to look.

Live ADS-B

Position data

Worldwide

Receiver network

None

Account required

Launching soon

Status

Get the launch announcement ↓

Scope

The sky, instrumented

Overflight polls live ADS-B data for the traffic around your position, runs every return through a visibility model, and plots the aircraft you could actually see on a radar scope.

The most prominent aircraft is highlighted first on the scope and its details shown. The rest wait in a carousel, ranked. Swipe through them to see the details for each of them.

Overflight on iPhone identifying a Southwest Boeing 737-700 from Santa Rosa to San Diego: route STS to SAN, the radar scope with the nearby traffic plotted, look line reading bearing 234 degrees, 4.4 nautical miles, 52 degrees up, and a readout bar with altitude, vertical speed, ground speed, and track.
Live traffic: A Southwest 737 out of Santa Rosa, the rest of the sky ranked behind it
Incoming

Interesting inbound

Military and otherwise unusual traffic is highlighted separately. When one of these is closing on your position and holds on a steady track across consecutive sweeps rather than merely nearby, the instrument turns amber, the carousel pauses, and a countdown runs to overhead.

Amber means one thing in Overflight: something interesting this way comes. Interesting inbounds are part of Overflight Pro, but the first one is free on every install.

Overflight on iPad in landscape in its amber INBOUND state: a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, tail 07-7185, callsign RCH305, eight nautical miles out and closing, with a countdown of one minute fifteen seconds to overhead and the note CYCLING PAUSED.
A C-17 Globemaster III, eight miles out, T−1:15
Range

Not just distance, but visibility

The scope's range isn't just a flat radius, because sight lines aren't flat. Visibility is slant range: a widebody at cruise is visible from far beyond a turboprop at pattern altitude, and standing at 8,000 feet in the mountains is not the same as standing at sea level at the beach. The model accounts for both, and the RANGE setting (NEAR, NORMAL, FAR) scales how much of the visible sky it admits.

Apple TV

An instrument for the living room, or the lounge

On Apple TV, Overflight is an ambient display with optional voice announcements. One aircraft is automatically tracked until it leaves your sky, then the next one is selected. Use your Siri Remote to manually choose targets.

It's as much at home in an office or an FBO lounge as in a living room. The TV's own coarse location is enough to start; for precise position and direction, the app generates a QR code you can scan with your iPhone.

More on the Apple TV version →

Overflight on Apple TV tracking a United Boeing 737-900 from Chicago O'Hare to Los Angeles, registration N68452, descending through 8,500 feet at 250 knots, with the radar scope showing its position.
Live traffic: A United 737 inbound to LAX, on the big screen
Spoken traffic

Don't just see what's up there, hear it

For the visually impaired there's full VoiceOver support. But even without accessibility controls, Overflight provides optional spoken ATC-like traffic callouts:

Spoken traffic call "Traffic, two o'clock, twelve miles, nine degrees high, a Boeing seven thirty-seven eight hundred, flight level three three zero, Southwest flight fourteen fifty-nine, Bozeman to Denver."

Data

What it runs on

Positions
Live ADS-B: the transponder signals aircraft broadcast, received by a worldwide community of volunteer ground stations.
Routes
Airline route lookups via AeroDataBox, with adsbdb as fallback, geometry-checked before display.
Elevation
Open-Meteo terrain lookup, so the visibility model knows how high you're standing.
Location
Your coordinates leave the device only to query nearby aircraft and terrain elevation, and during the optional Apple TV pairing handoff, which the server deletes within minutes. Details in the privacy policy.
Account
None. Nothing to sign into.
Price
Free for limited functionality. Overflight Pro adds routes on every aircraft, spoken traffic, interesting inbounds, and always-on with no idle timeout, all for $3.99/month or $19.99/year, each with a 7-day free trial, or $69.99 once.

How the whole thing works →

Launch announcement

Know the day it launches

Questions