Support — Plain and Simple Planes

Open it and it tells you what is flying above you, sorted by how nearly overhead each one is. No ads, nothing to buy, and no account.

Do I need an account?

No. There is nothing to sign in to and nothing to buy. Open it, allow it to see roughly where you are, and that is the whole setup.

Does it work without the internet?

No, and this is the one Plain and Simple app that doesn't.

Where aircraft are right now is not something your phone can know on its own — it has to be asked of receivers on the ground. In aeroplane mode the app will tell you plainly that it has no connection, rather than showing you an empty sky and letting you think it is quiet up there. Those are different things and the app never lets them look the same.

It says "nothing we can see" and I can see an aeroplane

That sentence is exact, and it is the honest version of what the app knows.

Aircraft positions come from volunteers running radio receivers at home. What you get is what somebody's aerial happened to hear, which is not the same as everything in the sky:

• Low and small aircraft are often missed. A light aircraft at 2,000 feet may not reach any receiver at all.
• Military aircraft are frequently absent, deliberately.
• Coverage thins away from cities. In a rural area the list can be genuinely empty while aircraft are passing over.
• Some aircraft carry equipment that broadcasts a position only when asked by radar rather than continuously.

So the app will say nothing we can see. It will never say nothing is up there, because it does not know that and neither does anyone else.

The list is empty and I'm in a city

Check, in this order:

• Is the filter on? If it is, the Sky screen says so under the heading — something like airline flights · 31 hidden. Tap that line to change it.
• How far is it looking? Settings → How far to look. The default of 30 nautical miles is deliberate; much further and everything new is below the horizon.
• Is there a connection? The app says so if there isn't.

Why does it hide aircraft on the ground?

Because the app is about what is flying above you, and an aircraft taxiing at an airport is neither. Near a big airport it is most of the list.

Turn it off in Settings → What to show if you want them. An aircraft that reports no height at all is not assumed to be on the ground and stays in the list either way.

The filters — what do "airline" and "private" actually mean?

They are worked out from what each aircraft broadcasts about itself, and it is worth knowing which signal each one uses:

• Airline flights are the ones broadcasting an airline's code and a flight number — DAL1247, which the app shows as Delta 1247. Private aircraft broadcast their tail number instead.
• Helicopters say they are rotorcraft. That one is unambiguous.
• Private and light means an aircraft describing itself as light or small and not flying under an airline's code. Both halves matter: a regional airliner is a small aircraft, and it belongs under airline.

This is deliberately not based on size alone. A private jet is the same size class as an airliner, so a filter built on size would file it under airline with complete confidence and be wrong every time.

Some aircraft broadcast neither a usable flight number nor a category. Those are counted separately — the Sky screen says how many couldn't be identified — rather than being guessed into one pile or the other.

Why is there no "from and to" on most aircraft?

Three different reasons, and the app tells them apart:

• No route filed. Most light aircraft are flying locally and never file one. This is the ordinary case and means nothing is wrong.
• Route not confirmed. A flight with that number exists, but it is not this aeroplane's. Tap the aircraft and it explains which check it failed.
• Couldn't look it up. The route service didn't answer. Everything else on the screen came with the aircraft's position and is still good.

The second one is worth explaining, because it is common and it is on purpose. The route database is keyed by flight number, and flight numbers are reused: the same number often flies the return leg an hour later, and a different pair of cities next season. Measured against real traffic, roughly half its answers described a different flight from the one overhead.

So every route is checked against the aircraft's own position, height and climb before it is shown. If the number says the aeroplane is landing at Atlanta and the aeroplane is climbing away from Atlanta at 1,500 feet a minute, the app works out that it is the return leg and shows that instead. If it cannot make sense of it at all, it shows nothing. A wrong answer with a hedge on it is still telling you your aeroplane is going to Austin when it is going to Boston.

The arrow points the wrong way

The arrow turns with the phone's compass, which is the one part of this that a magnet, a laptop, or a car can upset. Move away from anything metal and wave the phone in a figure of eight to settle it.

Many iPads have no compass at all. On those, the app drops the arrow and gives you the direction against north instead — look west-north-west — and says that is what it is doing. The direction is still right; you just have to find north yourself.

The camera shows nothing, or asks for permission I don't want to give

The Look Up tab is the only part that uses the camera, and it is optional. The Sky tab answers exactly the same question — the same aircraft, with a direction and an angle for each — and needs no camera at all.

Nothing is photographed or recorded on that tab. It is a viewfinder so you can compare the sky with the list, and there is no way for the app to capture a frame.

The widget says "open Planes"

The widget never asks for your location — it reads the last position the app looked at. If you haven't opened the app for several hours, that position is too old to describe a sky with, so the tile says so rather than showing you what was overhead this morning.

Open the app once and the tile catches up.

Why does it need my location?

To work out which aircraft are above you, and which way to tell you to look. It is rounded to about a kilometre before it is used, it is never stored, and it goes to the aircraft network rather than to us — there is no Plain and Simple server. The privacy page has the detail.

Deleting everything

Delete the app. Your settings go with it, and there is nothing anywhere else — no account, no server, nothing kept by anyone.

Getting in touch

help@plainandsimple.app — a real person reads it.

If a route looked wrong, the most useful things to include are the flight number, roughly where you were, and what it said. That is exactly how the route checking got built in the first place.