Planedex

Catch real planes around you.

A plane-spotting adventure for kids and their grown-ups. A live radar map shows the real aircraft near you right now. Point your phone at the sky and the camera tags what's overhead. Catch what you find, meet the actual plane — when it was built, where it lives, who flies it — and build a collection worth showing someone.

How it works

1. Open the map and see what's flying nearby.
2. Point your phone at the sky — the camera tags what's up there.
3. Catch it, then tap “Tell me more” to meet that exact plane.
4. Earn ranks and badges, and quiz the family on what you've found.

What's free

All of it, and permanently:

• Live radar map, with planes drawn as real silhouettes, each sized to its true length
• Point-at-the-sky camera that tags what's overhead
• Catching, logging, and the collection
• Routes: where a plane is from, where it's going, miles to go, and time left. Private flights say so instead of going blank.
• Field Notes for US and Canadian planes, read from the FAA and Transport Canada registers: the year that exact plane was built (“7 years before the first iPhone”), its engines in kid words, where it lives, who flies it, and, when one exists, a photo of the actual aircraft. It even says when a plane is a local.
• 35 badges, including ones read straight from the register: Golden Oldie, Time Traveler, Air Show Star, Maple Leaf, and Homebuilt for kit planes
• The States Passport: a stamp for every US state and Canadian province a caught plane calls home
• Quiz with ranks from Rookie to Master (Master takes the hints away). When a real plane is overhead, it stars in the questions.
• Weekly quests, a Fact of the Day, and a rarest-catch card
• Pass-and-play Family Duel, with an all-time win tally
• Rare-plane alerts, plus Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets
• Trading-card sharing
• Hundreds of fun facts, and three warbirds new to the book: the P-51 Mustang, T-6 Texan, and B-17 Flying Fortress

Nothing that was ever free moves behind the paywall. That's a house rule, not a promotion.

Planedex Plus

$2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, with Family Sharing on — one purchase covers the household.

Plus is the grown-ups' half of Planedex. It adds three things, and none of them were ever free:

• Deep Dives. Grown-up reading on 70 aircraft types: design stories, how to tell lookalikes apart, records and rivalries, who flies them. Written for the parent who got curious somewhere around the fourth Airbus of the afternoon.
• Field Notes for grown-ups. The register's fine print on that exact airframe: registration, Mode S hex code, engine model, airworthiness class, kit maker, registry date, and who it's registered to when that's a company or government body. Private owners are never named.
• The family logbook and Household Challenges. One shared list of everyone's catches across the family's phones. And Challenges: a five-round plane quiz you send to someone in the family, to play on their own phone whenever they like, each at their own rank, with an all-time record between you. Everyone keeps their own logbook and badges — a catch in the family feed doesn't count as yours.

Every purchase is fronted by a spelled-out math problem, so it's a grown-up buying, not a kid.

Privacy

No accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking, and no data collected by us.

Every question Planedex sends out is about planes. The live map asks what's flying near a point — rounded, so it isn't your exact spot. Everything else asks about one particular aircraft: what it looks like, what the FAA or Transport Canada register says about it, and what route it's flying. Owner names and addresses are stripped from register records before anything is stored. Your location is never sent for a register lookup, and how far a plane lives from you is worked out on your phone.

The optional family logbook lives in your family's own iCloud, shared through Apple's standard sharing sheet. We run no server for it and can't see it. Its records hold the plane, the time, a nickname the spotter typed, and a random ID for that copy of the app — never a location.

Everything else the app remembers stays on your phone and is deleted with the app.

Read the full Planedex privacy policy →

Questions

Email support@revvinschown.com, or see the support page.