Aircraft Radar View

Summary: Opening the standalone Aircraft Radar scope, setting its location, and using its range, filter, table and display controls.

The Radar is a separate, pop-out radar scope – a rotating-sweep display showing live aircraft as blips, similar to a real ATC radar screen. Click the Radar button (the satellite-dish icon) in the map’s corner button stack to open it in its own window, which you can move to a second monitor or keep alongside the main map. Clicking the button again while it’s already open just brings that window back to the front rather than opening a second one.

You need to be logged in to open the Radar.

Setting a Location

The Radar has no centre point until you set one, via the Set location (crosshair) icon:

• If the main map tab is still open, click Set location and then click a point directly on the map – the Radar will centre on wherever you clicked.
• Otherwise, it falls back to a Use my location button (your browser will ask permission to share your position).
• If neither works, you can type coordinates in manually.

Range & Sweep

• Choose a range of 5, 10, 20, or 30 miles using the buttons above the scope.
• The sweep completes a full rotation every 8 seconds, and pings any aircraft it crosses.
• Aircraft are colour-coded by altitude band: under 1,000 ft (grey), 1,000-10,000 ft (green), 10,000-25,000 ft (amber), and 25,000 ft+ (blue) – a legend appears under the scope.
• Military aircraft get an extra ring around their blip (hidden automatically when you’re using the military-only filter, since it’d be redundant).
• When a new aircraft enters range, you’ll see a floating label (type, callsign/registration, altitude) and hear a beep if audible pings are switched on.
• Hover any blip for a fuller tooltip: type, callsign, registration, altitude, groundspeed, squawk, distance and bearing.

Controls

The icon row above the scope:

• Set location – re-centre the Radar (see above).
• Toggle rain radar – overlays live rain radar imagery, refreshed every 10 minutes.
• Military aircraft only – filters the scope to show only aircraft flagged as military.
• Toggle range rings – shows or hides the mile-labelled distance rings.
• Toggle map overlay – a static line-art backdrop of the UK coastline, motorways/A-roads, rivers, and town/city names, drawn to scale and rotation with the scope.
• Toggle audible ping – switches the new-arrival beep on or off.
• Text size – a slider from 20% to 160%, for labels, tooltips and the table.
• Rotate to match your device compass – on a phone or tablet, rotates the whole scope so the direction you’re physically facing is “up”. iOS asks for a one-time permission the first time you tap this.
• Show airports in range – plots airports, airbases, airfields and heliports from the map’s location data, with ICAO code labels and a hover tooltip for the full name.
• Toggle aircraft table – shows a live table of in-range aircraft alongside (or below, in portrait) the scope.

The Aircraft Table

When switched on, the table lists every aircraft currently in range, nearest first. Two columns – aircraft and type – are always shown; use the column-toggle chips above the table to add Heading, Squawk, Altitude (with a climb/descend arrow) and Distance. Another chip cycles how the Type column displays: full name, ICAO code, or both. Military aircraft and emergency squawks (7500/7600/7700) are always highlighted in the table regardless of which columns you’ve toggled on.

A Few Things to Know

• All of your Radar settings (range, toggles, text size, window size and position) are remembered per-browser, so the scope opens the way you left it next time.
• The Radar shows the same civil and military traffic as the rest of the map – there’s no separate data feed, just a different way of viewing it, capped at a 30-mile range.