Point your phone at the sky.
Find out what is up there.

SpotFlight labels the aircraft overhead in your camera view — callsign, altitude, distance, and where the flight is going — from live open ADS-B data. It also tells you when one is about to cross the Sun.

One-time purchase. No subscription, no ads, no account, no tracking.

Aim and identify

Hold up your phone and the aircraft in front of you are labelled in place: callsign, type, altitude, distance, and the cities the flight connects. Not a map you have to translate into the sky around you — the real airplane, in the direction you are looking.

The geometry is done properly

Full WGS84 geodesy, Earth curvature computed exactly rather than approximated, and dead reckoning that corrects two separate delays: how old the position was when the feed reported it, and how long ago that reply arrived. The label lands where the aircraft is, not where it was.

Fix the compass with your finger

Every phone's compass is off by 5 to 15 degrees depending on what is around it. That is the real limit on accuracy — every other source of error is orders of magnitude smaller. So drag until the labels sit on the aircraft you can actually see, and the rest of the sky comes right with them.

Catch a plane crossing the Sun

SpotFlight works out, from exactly where you are standing, the moment an aircraft will cross the disc of the Sun or the Moon, and warns you a minute ahead with the direction to face. An airliner crosses the Sun in about one second — nobody catches that without being told it is coming.

The astronomy is checked, not approximated: positions are validated against NASA JPL's DE421 ephemeris to within 28 arcseconds for the Sun and 46 for the Moon, and the Moon's parallax is computed for your exact spot — at 384,000 km its direction shifts nearly a degree, twice its own width, depending on where you stand.

Never look directly at the Sun, with or without a camera. Frame it on the screen instead.

Know before you look up

An alert when an aircraft is about to pass close overhead, with the countdown and the direction to face — in time to walk outside. And a map of nearby traffic with the actual cone your camera covers drawn on it, so you can see which way to turn.

How it works

• Allow location and camera. Your position is where every calculation starts. The camera is the backdrop — no image is ever read, stored or sent.
• Point at the sky. Aircraft in range appear as labelled targets: green above the horizon, orange when the Earth's curve is in the way.
• Nudge the compass, then look up. Drag once to align, and trust what you see.

What it cannot do

It needs a network; there is no offline mode. It shows aircraft that broadcast ADS-B and are heard by a volunteer receiver — coverage is dense over North America and Europe and thin elsewhere, and most military and some private aircraft never appear. iPhone, portrait, iOS 17 and later.

For observation and enjoyment. Not for navigation or any operational use.

Questions

The support page answers the ones people actually ask. Or write to [SUPPORT EMAIL].