Which app alerts you when planes fly overhead?

Most flight-tracker apps are built to follow a specific flight — yours, or one you look up. Getting a push notification because some aircraft entered the sky above your house is a different job, and it's the one Squawk is built around.

The two different jobs

Following a flight means you already know what you're tracking: a tail number, a flight number, a route. The mainstream trackers — Flightradar24, FlightAware, Plane Finder — and traveler apps like Flighty are excellent at this: live position, delays, gates, arrival estimates.

Watching your sky is the reverse: you don't know what's coming. You want your phone to tap you on the shoulder when something enters a patch of sky you care about — anything, or just military, or just a genuinely rare airframe. That requires the app to run geographic alert zones server-side and push to your lock screen, not just show a map when you open it.

What Squawk does for overhead alerting

• Alert zones you draw yourself. Long-press the map, drop a zone over your house (or anywhere), and get a lock-screen push when aircraft enter it — with callsign, type, altitude and heading. Filter the zone to military-only, or to specific types.
• Military base watching. Watch a base and get pushed when jets, tankers or heavy transports depart or land there, with runway and heading.
• Rare-aircraft heads-up. A ping when a genuinely uncommon airframe (B-52, U-2, E-4B, An-124…) is approaching your location — before it's overhead, not after.
• Emergency squawks worldwide. Optional push the moment any aircraft squawks 7700/7500/7600, anywhere.
• Zero-configuration start. Grant notifications and Squawk arms a sensible default zone at your location; refine it whenever you like.
• Identify what you're hearing. When the push arrives, one tap opens the live map on that aircraft — or point your phone at the sky with the AR view and it's labeled.

When another app is the better pick

• You're a traveler tracking your own itinerary — delay predictions, gates, connections: a dedicated travel app like Flighty, or your airline's app, fits better.
• You want the biggest general-purpose map on every platform — Flightradar24 and FlightAware are mature, cross-platform, and excellent at flight-following. Squawk is iPhone-only and spotter-focused, by design.
• You need ops-grade airport boards — a mainstream tracker or the airport's own site.

Honest limits

Squawk's alerts see what the community ADS-B receiver network sees. Coverage is excellent over most of North America and Europe, thinner elsewhere; aircraft flying with transponders off — which includes some military — are genuinely invisible to every consumer tracker, ours included. A quiet phone doesn't always mean a quiet sky. Data comes from community feeds with public credit and a no-resale pledge.

Price

Free to download with the live map, military layer, trails, replay, logbook and one alert zone included. Pro — push alerts beyond the first zone, base watching, rare-aircraft pings, weather and airspace layers, full history — is $4.99/month or $34.99/year, and the yearly plan starts with a 1-week free trial.

Get Squawk on the App Store