Map The Airspace Overhead With Siri [iOS Tips]

By

Planes Above Me

Ever wonder what’s going on in the skies above you at any given time? If you’re interested in airline flights in the air over your head, you can just ask Siri.

The personal digital assistant will check WolframAlpha for you and drop you a great little chart of the planes in the air overhead.

Simply enable Siri with a click and hold on the Home button and say, “What planes are above me right now.” Siri will search the WolframAlpha site and return a chart of the planes in your local airspace.

The chart includes the airline, the flight number, the altitude, and the angle of the plane, which should help airline geeks plenty. In addition, if you swipe down to the bottom of the results screen, you’ll get a pretty cool Sky map as well.

This only seems to work in the US, and Reddit user Clovis69 says it has to do with the FAA mandates in this country.

“In the US the FAA mandates airlines enable their transponder to give out open flight information unless they specifically ask for a waver on a flight by flight basis. Few other countries do that, so places like flightaware go off of transponders and filed flight plans, by 2020 the US mandates all flights have these transponders. That’s probably why they can do this in the US and not in other countries.”

Source: Reddit
Via: Lifehacker

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.