Overhead Flight Radar: what's that above the house?

Something goes over the garden and you look up. **Overhead Flight Radar** answers the next question: what is it, where has it come from, and where is it going.

In this build

• A live map of the aircraft around you, each pointing along the track it is actually flying
• A photograph of that exact airframe — by registration, not a stock picture of the type
• Route, distance flown and roughly how long is left
• Filters for taking off, landing and on the ground, each labelled with how many aircraft it would show
• Danish and English, light and dark, VoiceOver throughout

About the age

Tapping an aircraft tells you how old it is, and this turned out to be the hard part. Only a handful of countries publish the year an aircraft was built — the USA, Australia and Canada among them. **Sweden, Norway and Denmark publish none at all.** Of the 232 SAS airframes in the public register, twenty carry a build year, and all twenty are American or British registered.

So the app works down a ladder, and the first source that can answer wins:

• The build year, where a register publishes one
• An estimate from the airframe's serial number, calibrated per aircraft type
• Its place in the airline's delivery sequence, since airlines register aircraft in blocks and take delivery in order
• The type's own first year — an aircraft cannot be older than its own model

Everything below the first carries a tilde, and the last one is worded as a bound rather than an age: "2014 or newer", not "2014". Where none of them can answer, the app says the age is unknown instead of inventing a number.

Where the data comes from

Positions come from [airplanes.live](https://airplanes.live), a network of volunteer receivers. Routes and airframe details come from adsbdb.com, and photographs from Planespotters. All three are free, and all three are credited inside the app.

Next

Alerts for aircraft passing overhead, and search by flight number or registration.