Live radar showing real aircraft around you, updated every 5 seconds. No sign-up needed.

1 Tap any aircraft

See its callsign, route (airport codes and city names), altitude, speed, airline and a photo. The flight path trail appears on the map.

2 Toolbar — bottom of screen

Grouped into four clusters — views, then find & track, then info & config, then system:

• Traffic — list of all aircraft, nearest first. Tap one to jump to it.
• Stats — live numbers: total traffic, altitude spread, active runways.
• Overhead — your 5 closest aircraft right now, with route and distance.
• Search — find and fly to any city, airport or address, or track a specific aircraft; also opens from the 🔎 icon at the top of the screen.
• GPS — centers the map back on your current GPS position. (Not the same as Search above — that one looks something up, this one just flies you home.)
• Spotter — AR mode: point your camera at the sky, a live reticle shows what's overhead using your compass heading.
• Weather — full aviation weather briefing (QNH, wind, visibility, cloud layers) for your current location or any curated airport, searchable, plus an optional real precipitation radar overlay on the map itself.
• Comms — one-tap ATC audio, no hardware needed (see below).
• Setup — set your location name, change radar range, data source.
• Pause — freezes the radar (data keeps buffering) if you need to study something without it moving.
• Playback — scrub back through recently logged aircraft positions (see below).
• Demo — the guided tour mentioned above.

3 Top bar icons

• ⛶ Hide panels (far left) — instantly hides every open panel to reveal a clean map; tap again to bring them all back exactly where they were. Buried a panel under another instead? The floating panel switcher that appears whenever more than one is open brings any of them back to front.
• 🚢 Ship toggle — live marine (AIS) traffic alongside the planes, off by default.
• ◉ Hover names — show saved-location names on mouse hover, not just tap (desktop).
• 🔎 Search — same as the Search toolbar button.
• 🛫 Add / track — quick entry point to add a location, airport, or aircraft to track, without opening Search first.
• ↻ Refresh — reloads the app to pick up the latest version.
• ⚙ Settings — appearance, panels, alerts and troubleshooting (see below).
• 💎 Premium — jumps straight to the Premium section of Settings to unlock real gate/terminal/baggage/delay data (see below).
• ☕ Support — a voluntary tip jar, nothing gated behind it.
• ESC (far right) — permanently closes every open panel. Different from Hide panels above: this one doesn't remember to bring them back.

4 Colors & symbols

• Icon color = altitude — cyan (low) · green · amber · violet · red (high)
• Cyan lines = runways. Zoom in for full airport detail.
• Amber pulsing runway = actively in use right now.
• Amber dot = your radar center, cyan dots = saved/friend locations — both breathe gently; tap one to reveal its name.
• Amber dashed line behind a selected aircraft = its recent flown path.
• Violet dashed line to a distant marker = its full route, origin to destination.
• Short cyan dashed line just ahead of a selected aircraft = a 5-minute projection from its current track and speed.
• Pulsing red ring = an active emergency squawk (7500 hijack · 7600 lost comms · 7700 general emergency).

5 Filter what you see

In Traffic → ⚙ Sort & Filters, narrow by operator or aircraft type, set a minimum altitude, or a max distance. Matching aircraft dim on the map (not removed, so you keep situational awareness) and drop out of Traffic/Stats/Overhead. Applies instantly, no rescan needed — leave a field blank to show everything.

6 Track a specific aircraft — or search by airline

In Search / Locate → ✈️ Aircraft, enter an ICAO hex code or a registration (e.g. PH-UTL) and tap Track. It watches the same live feed the app already polls — no separate lookup — and auto-selects the aircraft the instant it's in range. Not there yet? It just sits in the list as "watching…" until it appears. Once tracked, a quiet notice flashes the moment its status changes — departed, in transit, landed, or back out of range — so you don't have to keep the panel open and watch it yourself.

The same box also searches by airline — type a name like KLM or Ryanair and every matching aircraft currently in range shows up at once (matched against the aircraft card's own "Operator" field). Tap any result to jump straight to it. Only ever covers aircraft actually in range right now — there's no separate airline lookup or global fleet database behind it.

Add the optional From/To fields underneath to find a specific flight number — e.g. airline KLM, from AMS, to LHR narrows the results to that airline's flight(s) actually flying that route right now, using each aircraft's real resolved route (the same free lookup the aircraft card already uses). Still not a timetable — nothing shows if that airline isn't currently flying the route within range.

7 Listen to ATC — no hardware needed

Tap an aircraft, then tap its 🎧 badge — Comms opens with the nearest airport already filled in, and a hint tells you whether it's an arrival or departure feed to look for. Near Schiphol (EHAM), real ATC audio (Approach, Radar, Dutch Mil) plays instantly, right in the app. Anywhere else, a guaranteed Listen on LiveATC.net link opens the stream in your browser.

Found a working stream URL yourself for another airport? Paste it under "paste a direct stream URL" and tap 💾 Save — it's remembered on your device and shows up automatically every time you open that airport's Comms again.

8 RTL-SDR — your own hardware tuner (optional)

Got an RTL-SDR v3 dongle? Comms' collapsed Advanced: RTL-SDR section gives you a full tuner — real frequencies, squelch, live audio — instead of relying on LiveATC streams. One-time setup:

1. Install the two tools it needs: brew install rtl-sdr ffmpeg (macOS) or sudo apt install rtl-sdr ffmpeg (Linux).
2. Run the helper script bundled with the app: python3 skywatch_airband.py. Leave it running in a terminal.
3. In Comms → Advanced: RTL-SDR, confirm the helper address is http://localhost:8000, then tap any frequency to tune it.

Optional: pip install vosk before starting the helper turns on a live, best-effort ATC Transcript of whatever frequency you're tuned to (offline speech-to-text, no cloud) — real ATC audio is noisy and jargon-heavy, so treat it as a rough aid, not a perfect record. Everything else works identically without it.

9 Settings — appearance & personalization

The ⚙ gear icon in the top bar (not the same as the toolbar's Setup, which is your radar location, scan range and data source) covers: which panels are enabled and how long an idle one auto-hides, ticker scroll speed plus a custom scrolling message, your own equations for the bottom ticker (see below), map zoom sensitivity, distance units (nm/mi/km), a light theme for outdoor readability, skipping the cinematic intro, the emergency-squawk banner toggle, a real-time Data & API usage view, Playback logging on/off with a 24/48/72h retention choice (see below), and a one-tap Reset app if anything looks stuck or out of date.

The scrolling strip along the bottom of the screen is one combined ticker — live stats (in-range count, fastest/highest/closest, world clocks, etc.) plus a real, continuously-scrolling equation ticker woven in — type your own under Settings → Equations & explanations (one per line), wrap math in $...$ for a real typeset equation (e.g. $\rho_c = \frac{3H_0^2}{8\pi G}$), add || your explanation to say what it means, and optionally a third || https://a-real-link to make that item clickable — tapping it opens the link in a new tab. It always also carries one persistent, clickable Premium item — an amber upgrade offer while on the free tier, or a quiet green "active" status readout once you're actually subscribed. A brief glowing item also flashes in whenever the app makes a real connection — cyan ↗ for an outgoing lookup (route, weather, gate/delay data), green ↙ for incoming live position data — so you can actually see it working, not just trust that it is. The intro splash tagline is separate, fixed brand text — not part of this pool.

10 Premium — real flight status

The free feed already gives you real position, altitude, speed and route — Premium adds real gate, terminal, baggage belt, and delay/cancellation data for every flight, plus gate-change alerts for aircraft you're tracking. Any aircraft card showing 🔒 Premium next to one of those rows is a live preview of what's locked. Tap the 💎 gem icon in the top bar — or any locked row itself — to unlock it from Settings; checkout is real (via Paddle), starting at $4.99/mo, cancel any time.

11 Playback — rewind recent traffic

While the app is open, it quietly logs a snapshot of every aircraft in range once a minute — entirely on your own device (nothing sent anywhere). Tap Playback in the toolbar to scrub back through it: drag the slider, or hit Play for a fast time-lapse (1×/5×/20×) through whatever's been logged. Back to live instantly returns to the real live map — live polling never actually stops in the background, so nothing is missed while you're looking back. How far back you can go (24-72h) and whether it logs at all is configurable in Settings, along with a one-tap Clear playback history.

12 Account — sync your saved locations, connect with friends

Settings → Account is entirely optional — the app works fully without it, exactly as before. Enter your email and tap Send sign-in link; no password, just a one-time link emailed to you (expires in 15 minutes). Once signed in, Sync my saved locations uploads what you've saved on this device and pulls down anything saved from your other devices — merged, never overwritten. Invite a friend creates a real shareable link; once they accept, you can each see the other's saved-location list from the Friends section right there in Settings. Free accounts can connect up to 3 friends — Premium removes that limit. A For you section below Friends surfaces real, honest patterns from your own usage once there's enough of it — e.g. how often your usual route runs delayed — never fabricated, and it says so plainly when there isn't enough data yet. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what an account stores.

13 Book — search real flights & hotels

Tap Book in the toolbar for real flight and hotel search — a real Travelpayouts-hosted search, styled to match Peekaboo, right there in the panel. Real city-name search (not just airport codes), plus hotels via a toggle right there on the page. Prefer more room? Tap Open full page to open it in a new tab instead. Free for everyone, no sign-in needed. Peekaboo may earn a small commission if you book through it — never anything extra out of your pocket. Already have a flight number or tail number? Use the Track it live link right there in the Book panel to jump straight to tracking instead.