What's Flying Over My House Right Now? How to Find Out

To find out what is flying over your house right now, open a live flight map centered on where you are, look for the aircraft closest to you, and match it by direction and height. On GodsView there's a page that does the matching for you: What's overhead. Share your location or type your town, and it lists every aircraft within 60 km with the direction to look and how high above the horizon it is.

I live under a busy approach path, so I use it a lot. Here's how it works, how to read it, and why it sometimes can't tell you about the plane you are staring at.

See what's overhead

Step one: tell the map where you are

Open /overhead. You can press Use my location and allow the browser to share it, or type a town or address into the box and press Go. The page doesn't need an account. It refreshes every 15 seconds, and there's an Update button if you want a fresh fix right now.

When I type Garden City, New York, on a Saturday afternoon, the header reads "40 planes overhead · Within 60 km of Village of Garden City, New York · daylight". That's a lot of aircraft, because Garden City sits between JFK, LaGuardia and the busy airspace over Long Island. In most places you'll see far fewer.

How to match a plane on screen to the one in the sky

Each row tells you four things. Here is the top row from my screenshot:

So DL2141 is almost overhead: face north-northeast and look most of the way up. That matches a small, quiet contrail high in the sky. The next row, EDV5166, is a regional jet at 3,550 ft, 11.5 km away, only 5° above the horizon. That's the low, loud one you hear coming into LaGuardia.

The angle is the most useful number and the one most flight maps don't show. Two planes can both be "5 km away" on a map, but one is at 2,000 ft and roars over the rooftops while the other is at 38,000 ft and is a speck. The angle tells you which one you are actually looking at.

The list only shows aircraft in the air, closest first, up to twenty rows. Planes parked at the airport are left out, since you can't see them from your garden anyway.

Read the flight details

Tap any row on the overhead list and it opens that flight's own page. Or click any plane on the live map to get the full card: route, airline, registration, type, altitude, speed and heading. On the map card, the Route tab shows the estimated departure, the ETA and the distance flown and left.

If you know the flight number, skip all that and type it into Track a flight. You get the departure and arrival airports, gates, delay, altitude, speed, distance to go and landing time, plus a share link you can send to whoever is waiting at the airport. For a full walkthrough, including the 3D chase camera, see the flight tracking tutorial.

Why some planes never show up

Sometimes you hear a helicopter circling for twenty minutes and it's not on the list. That is normal. Live maps like GodsView are built mainly on ADS-B, a signal aircraft broadcast with their position, altitude and identity. If you want the technical background, how ADS-B flight tracking works covers it in depth. The short version of why a plane can be missing:

• It doesn't broadcast ADS-B. In the US, ADS-B Out is required in most controlled airspace (FAA), but many light aircraft flying low outside that airspace don't carry it, and outside the US the rules vary.
• It is military. Some military aircraft broadcast and many don't, especially on operations. When they do, GodsView marks them Military in the list. More on that in military aircraft tracking explained.
• Its identity is hidden. The FAA's LADD program lets owners ask for their aircraft to be kept off public data feeds (FAA LADD). Some still appear on the map with a privacy-protected identity, so you see a position but not a name.
• No receiver hears it. Low aircraft in valleys and rural areas can sit below the line of sight of every volunteer receiver nearby. They pop in and out.

So "not on the list" doesn't mean "not real". It means nobody's receiver picked up a public signal from it.

Ground distance vs how far away it really is

The distance on the list is measured along the ground to the point under the plane. For a low aircraft that's close to the real distance. For a cruising jet it isn't. A plane at 30,000 ft (about 9 km up) that's 4 km away along the ground is roughly 10 km from you in a straight line. That's why jets that look "right above you" on a map can look small and slow in the sky.

The angle above the horizon already accounts for this. If the list says 68° up, look 68° up.

Satellites over you tonight

Scroll down on the same page and you'll find Satellites over you · next 24 h. It lists passes of the International Space Station, China's space station and the Hubble Space Telescope over your location, with times, the direction they come from and go to, and the highest point they reach.

Each pass gets a label:

• Visible: the satellite is lit by the sun while your sky is dark. This is the one to go outside for. It looks like a steady, bright star moving across the sky with no blinking lights.
• In shadow: the satellite is in Earth's shadow, so you can't see it even though it's above you.
• Daylight: your sky is too bright.

For Garden City tonight, the page says Hubble climbs to 12° in the south at 6:35 PM and the Chinese station goes almost overhead, 73°, a few minutes before 7 PM. If you want the long explanation of how those times are calculated from orbital elements, read how satellite tracking works. NASA also runs Spot the Station for the ISS if you want sighting alerts by email.

What you can do once you've found it

Most of the time, finding the plane is the whole point. If you want more:

1. Follow it. On the map card press Follow to keep it centered while it flies.
2. Watch it in 3D. Track in 3D puts you behind the aircraft with a chase camera, and Ride along in 3D puts you in the cockpit. Both need GodsView Plus or Pro.
3. Get alerts about it. On a flight page, Get alerts for this flight tells you about gate changes, delays, take-off and landing. Alerts need a paid plan.
4. Share it. Every flight page and the overhead page have a share row with Copy link, WhatsApp, X and Telegram.

And if what you really want is to know about anything unusual near your home, not just planes, set up My places. It watches for earthquakes, storms, floods, wildfires and bad air within 50 km of the places you care about.