Everything you need to get flying.

Almost certainly not. That's the standby screen, and it means no aircraft are currently within your chosen range. Most places are quiet for long stretches, and at 3am nearly everywhere is.

Try widening the range by tapping the range chip on the radar — 5, 10, 15 or 20 nm. If it says "hidden by your filters" instead, traffic is up there but your filters are hiding it — check Menu → Hide GA / Cargo / Military.

Real aircraft. The radar shows everything within your range, but the card can only display one at a time — so the aircraft currently cycling on the card are drawn as bright arrows pointed the way they're flying, and everything else in range is drawn as a faint dot.

They aren't hidden away. Tap List and they're all there, brightest first, with the same bright or faint marker beside each row so you can tell which is which. Tap any row to bring that aircraft up on the card.

The counter in the bottom-right corner reads, for example, 14 in range · 8 shown — 14 aircraft around you, 8 of them taking turns on the card.

They're real. ACARS is the text system airline crews use in flight — talking to dispatch, maintenance and catering — and a slice of it is one human being typing to another. When nothing is in range, WingsAbove shows one on the standby panel instead of an empty screen.

Turn it on under Menu › More Settings › ACARS. Tap the message to open the full list, or use the ACARS button on any aircraft card.

The messages are collected by a volunteer network of radio receivers, then curated and anonymised by acarsdrama.com before anyone sees them. We license their feed as a paying member. Crews and passengers are never identifiable, and we never publish anything they haven't already published.

It's the difference between where the aircraft is and where it was heard, and the screen tells you which one it knows.

"over Cleveland" means we found that aircraft on the live map and it really is there. "heard near Cleveland" means all we know is which ground receiver picked the message up — the aircraft was within radio range of that spot, which can be a hundred miles or more.

We could have shown one word for both and nobody would have noticed. But one of them is a claim about an airplane and the other isn't, so they read differently on purpose.

Two different things cause this, and both are worth reporting.

Sometimes the flight data itself says the wrong aircraft type — registrations get reissued, and a database somewhere still holds the previous aircraft. We've had a United jet reported as a 1930s biplane this way. Other times we simply don't have artwork for that airline and aircraft combination yet, so it falls back to a generic shape.

Tap the callsign and we'll see which it was.

The artwork library is large but not infinite — roughly a thousand airline and aircraft combinations, and it grows every week. When there's no match you'll get a plain silhouette of the right kind of aircraft instead.

New artwork arrives on its own. The display checks for it in the background and downloads quietly, so a unit left running keeps getting better without you doing anything.

No — there's no GPS. You tell it where to watch in Menu → Location, and it stays on that patch of sky until you change it.

That's a feature as much as a limitation: set it to Heathrow or JFK and watch that sky from your desk. Moving the unit to another room changes nothing except its Wi-Fi signal.

Yes. Menu → Track a Flight, then type the flight number. You'll get its route, progress and arrival details even when it's nowhere near you — handy for a family member's flight.

You can also tap any aircraft on screen to open its details and see the route drawn on a map.

Yes — Menu → System Status → Cast. Turn it on and you'll get a web address on the same screen. Open that in any browser on your network and you'll see a live mirror of the display.

It works on phones, tablets, laptops and most smart TVs. Nothing to install.

Scan it with your phone and you'll be taken to live air traffic control audio for your nearest tower, via LiveATC. It's a link, not audio played through the device — the sound comes out of your phone.

Use Screen Cast. Turn it on under Menu → System Status, open the address it shows in a browser, and take a screenshot there. You get the display at full resolution with no glare or moiré — and it works straight from your phone.

Menu → Hide GA hides light propeller aircraft — the training Cessnas and Pipers that circle a field for hours. Private jets and turboprops are kept, since those are usually the interesting catches.

There are matching filters for cargo and military if you want a quieter screen.

Automatically. The display checks when it starts up and installs quietly in the background, so an occasional restart keeps you current. There's nothing to download or click.

You can see which version you're on at Menu → System Status.

On these beta units, unplug it. There's no power switch on this build — the enclosures are hand-made and we wanted them with you rather than waiting on parts.

A panel-mounted power switch is coming in the next hardware revision. In the meantime, if you'd rather not reach behind the unit, an inline USB switch on the cable works well.

Unplugging is safe. If the screen happens to be downloading artwork at that moment it simply picks up where it left off next time.

Yes. The aircraft data, routes, artwork and updates all come over your Wi-Fi. Without a connection the display will tell you it can't reach the flight service rather than pretending the sky is empty.