How to identify a plane flying over you

The fastest way: open a live flight-tracking map, zoom to your location, and match the aircraft's direction of travel to what you're seeing. Most aircraft broadcast their identity continuously, so within a few seconds you can usually know the flight, the aircraft type, where it came from and where it's going.

Step by step

Open a live map at your location. You can do this in any browser with a free tracker — here's ours, no app or signup needed.
Match the heading. If the plane you can see is moving north-east, look for the icon near you pointing north-east. At typical airliner altitudes there are often several aircraft above you at once — direction of travel is the quickest disambiguator.
Sanity-check the altitude. A tiny cross-shaped dot leaving a contrail is cruising at 30,000–40,000 ft. A plane where you can make out windows or hear engines clearly is usually below 10,000 ft — likely arriving, departing, or general aviation.
Tap it. You'll get the callsign, aircraft type, altitude, speed, and usually the route.

Reading the clues without an app

Contrail = high and far. Persistent contrails form at cruise altitudes; that aircraft is 5–8 miles above you and probably not going to your local airport.
Engine count and wing shape. Four engines is rare now — likely a Boeing 747, an Airbus A340/A380, or something military like a C-17. High straight wings with propellers suggests a regional turboprop or a military transport.
Gray paint, no visible livery — likely military. Fighters, tankers and transports all fly in low-visibility gray.

Or just point your phone at it

Squawk — the iOS app this site belongs to — has an AR view that projects the live traffic picture onto your camera: point the phone at the sky and the aircraft overhead is labeled with its callsign, type, altitude and distance. It's part of Squawk Pro, and every install starts with a free 7-day trial of everything.

Get Squawk on the App Store Open the free web tracker

Why some planes don't show up

Trackers see aircraft that broadcast ADS-B, picked up by a volunteer receiver network. Coverage is excellent over most of North America and Europe, but some aircraft are genuinely invisible: older light aircraft without ADS-B, some helicopters at low altitude, and military aircraft flying with transponders off or in modes the network can only partially track. If you can see a plane and the map can't, that's usually why — not a glitch.