Want to know what’s flying overhead? There’s an app for that

New York
CNN
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People in New Jersey are freaking out (!) over sightings of what appear to be “giant drones” flying at night. Government officials say at least some of these sightings are old commercial flights.

Turns out, there is one few applications this can help avoid this type of confusion.

Apps like Flightradar24, Plane Finder and FlightAware have features that let users see in real-time what planes are flying around, including the thousands of commercial and private flights and helicopters that may be in the sky at any given time. In some cases, applications it can also identify unmanned aircraft, such as commercial drones that report their location in the same way that airplanes do.

With these apps, or their websites, you can open a map of your location and see the air traffic above you, along with details about individual aircraft, such as their altitude, speed and destination. You may also see a code indicating the airline of the aircraft or a private aircraft registration code.

With FlightRadar24 and Plane Finder, you can point your phone’s camera at a plane in the sky and the apps will notify you about it, even at night, sort of like Shazam for airplanes.

Flightradar24 he says that on any given day, he can follow more than 200,000 aircraft across the sky. And following these planes it has become a hobby for some people; for example, in August 2022, when a US Air Force plane carrying then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan, more than 700,000 people watched the event in real time. Flightradar24.

These applications include data sent by most aircraft to ground stations and other aircraft, known as “ADS-B” data, as well as satellites and other data sources.

But if you’re having trouble identifying an aircraft in the app, you may need to zoom out on the map; experts say that planes are often farther away than they appear to the human eye.

Of course, not all aircraft will appear on these platforms; some small hobbyist drones, for example, don’t have the technology to broadcast their locations the way commercial aircraft do. Some military and high-end aircraft are also blocked, such as Air Force One.