Airside Flyer Operating Manual

Overview & Support

Airside tracks the flights you care about — yours and your friends’ — with live position, delay predictions, gate and baggage details, and the turbulence forecast along the route.

Need help? Email support@airsideapp.com. Questions, bug reports, and feature requests are all welcome, and a real person reads every one. If something looks wrong with a flight, include its flight number and date.

Airside runs as an Android app and in any modern browser at pwa.airsideapp.com. Sign in with the same Google account on each device and your flights and settings follow you.

Getting Started

1. Sign in. Open Settings and tap Sign in with Google.
2. Start Airside Pro. Live tracking, flight search, and adding flights run on licensed flight data, so they need a subscription. Tap any Pro feature and Airside shows you how to subscribe.
3. Add a flight. Go to Flights, tap +, and type a plain-English query such as los angeles to jfk on delta tomorrow. Tap the right result to save it.
4. Open it. Tap the row to expand it. Everything else in this guide — tracking, turbulence, delay prediction, gate and baggage, push alerts — happens around that flight.

Tracking a flight for someone else? Use Mark as friend’s flight in the row’s overflow (⋮) menu so it doesn’t count as a trip you flew.

FAQ

Tap a question to expand its answer.

Flights

The Flights screen is the heart of the app: the flights you’re tracking, their status, and what’s coming next.

Adding Flights

Tap +. There are two ways to find a flight:

• Search box — an airline and flight number in any form (AS 735, AS735, Alaska Airlines flight 735), or plain English: BOS to LAX, to JFK, United from SFO tomorrow. Add a date to find a past flight: AS 735 on 3/2/2024. Press Enter, then tap a result to add it. The clock icon shows recent searches. See Flight Search for everything it understands.
• The form below — pick airline, departure airport, optional destination, and date, then choose from the matches. Best when you know exactly which flight you want.

Older flights need the flight number. A search by route or airport only reaches about three months back. For anything older, give the airline, flight number and date together (Alaska 735 on March 2, 2023) and the search looks it up in FlightAware’s historical records, which go back to 2011. A flight older than that can still be added from the form below.

Adding a flight requires Airside Pro; browsing flights you already saved doesn’t. You can also import from your calendar.

Flights before 2011. Flight-tracking records only go back to January 2011, so an older flight can’t be looked up. Enter the airline, flight number, both airports and the date, and the form offers to add it from those details instead — it joins your list and your Travels map like any other flight, just without tracking data. Airlines that no longer fly are offered in the airline list too, each marked with the year it stopped operating, so a flight on TWA or Continental is recorded under that airline rather than whoever uses its code today. Give the flight number and the destination: with nothing to look the flight up in, they can’t be filled in for you.

The Flight List

Flights are grouped into sections:

• Current — everything you are travelling on right now: flights between departure and arrival, and anything leaving within the next 24 hours, so a connection or the next morning’s onward leg sits beside the flight you are on. Connecting flights are never split: once the first leg is here, every leg you connect on to joins it, however far out its own departure sits. A flight stays here for 12 hours after landing, so the row is where you left it while you collect bags.
• Upcoming — everything further out, soonest first.
• Friends’ flights — flights you’re watching for someone else, shown in your local time. Mark a flight as a friend’s from its overflow (⋮) menu, then Friend’s name… in that same menu to say whose it is — the name leads the card’s time line, and labels the flight in your export calendar.
• Past — completed flights, collapsed by default and split by year with each year’s flight count and miles.

Each card is a brief, not a dashboard: the airline logo, the route and flight number, a status badge, and only what you need to know next. A flight on the ground shows its departure and arrival times on one line, led by the day (Tomorrow — a flight today shows just the times); an arrival on a later day carries a small +1. When the airline has posted a delay, the scheduled time is struck through beside the new one. The times on the card are always the airline’s. When we expect more delay than the airline has posted, our estimate goes in the words underneath — Departure likely 7:41 AM — with why: that the airline still shows the flight on time and, when we know it, where the plane that will fly it is right now. A flight in the air shows its departure and arrival with the time to go between them, over a progress bar drawn on the turbulence strip, the stretch already flown dimmed back.

Under the numbers, one short line explains them when they need it: how early or late a flight will arrive, the turbulence forecast for the rest of the route in words (Light chop in about 25 min, smooth after), or, after landing, the arrival gate and baggage carousel. On your next flight — and only that one — the line also names your next move: the estimated boarding time and gate, then a countdown once boarding is underway, written in purple, the color the current stage of an expanded flight wears. Expanding a card hands the numbers over to the full details below and keeps the words. A colored dot marks a flight whose data changed since you last looked; it clears when you expand the card or leave the screen, and an expanded card says when it was last updated. And when two of your flights connect (same airport, scheduled within six hours of each other), a dashed line joins the two rows in place of the usual plain divider, carrying the layover time: green when the connection clears 45 minutes, red when it’s tighter than that. When our delay prediction changes that time from what the airline’s own times give, it is marked (estimated), so a late inbound flight turns the layover red before the airline admits it. The dashed line is there as soon as the connection is; the time itself appears once both legs are past their Scheduled status — close enough to travel that the timing is live — not weeks ahead.

The search box in the header filters the flights you already have — it never looks up new ones. Type a flight number, an airline, an airport, a BOS/LAX route, a date, or a trip name; several words narrow it further. Clear it with × or Esc.

The + button adds a flight and the refresh button re-fetches data on demand. Each row’s overflow (⋮) menu offers Share, Mark as friend’s flight, Select (to build a trip), and Delete.

Flight Details

Tap a row to expand it. The flight is laid out as a journey in travel order, with completed steps dimmed and the step you’re at right now highlighted:

• Departure airport — terminal and gate, surface weather, and any active FAA delay. The weather readout is tagged Forecast or Now depending on whether the flight’s hour at that airport is still ahead, and always ends with the expected flight category for that hour — a green VFR or a red IFR, split on the 3-mile visibility line. It is a forecast visibility only; a low cloud ceiling with clear air under it can still make the airport IFR when this reads VFR.
• Boarding — an estimate (airlines don’t publish one), counting down through the last hour.
• Aircraft — type, tail number, route miles, and cabin details where known.
• Arrival — expected arrival time, then the arrival airport card with gate, baggage claim and any FAA delay there. A ground stop or delay program at your destination shows as soon as your departure is near, however long the flight — it holds your flight on the ground before takeoff — while holding in the air there shows once your landing is close.
• Progress bar — tinted with the turbulence forecast along the route.
• Show on map — opens the flight on the map with its route drawn. When the inbound aircraft is known, a second button tracks that leg instead.

The departure and arrival times here are gate times — Depart gate and Gate arrival, the times you plan around. The map’s timeline shows the runway times instead. Past flights show a simpler panel: the actual gate departure and arrival times and airports.

Status Badges

Trips

Collect the flights that belong together — the legs of one journey — into a trip. Press and hold any flight (or pick Select from its menu), tap the others you want, then tap Make trip. A single flight can be a trip too: select just the one and give it a name.

A trip appears as one block with a header naming it, the route it takes (BOS/DCA/BOS), and its dates. A trip of several flights starts folded — tap the header to open it; one holding a single flight opens straight away, having nothing to fold. The trip’s own menu offers Rename trip (leave the name empty to go back to automatic naming), Select flights, and Remove trip, which breaks the trip up and keeps every flight in it. To pull out one flight use Remove from trip in its own menu; whatever is left stays a trip, down to the last flight.

Flights booked together are grouped automatically when calendar import finds a shared booking reference. Trips are private to you, sync across your devices, and are free — no Pro needed.

A trip is your own itinerary, so a friend’s flight cannot be selected for one, and its menu offers no trip actions.

Delay Prediction

For flights departing within 24 hours, Airside predicts delays using machine learning — often before the airline announces them. It watches the real-time status of the inbound aircraft assigned to your flight and active FAA delay programs.

The departure and arrival times a card shows in large type are always the airline’s. Our prediction is weighed end by end, and it speaks only when it runs more than ten minutes past the delay the airline already shows for that end: a Delay Likely badge, and our estimate in the words under the times (Departure likely 7:41 AM, Arrival likely 11:05 AM). A late inbound aircraft moves the departure. A hold at the destination — a ground stop or delay program there — usually moves only the arrival: airlines often push back on time and wait on the ground, so the card says Plan to board on time rather than suggest you can arrive late. If the inbound aircraft is known, an Inbound line at the bottom of the expanded row shows where it is and when it should land, so you can see what your aircraft is waiting on.

With push notifications on, you get a heads-up when a prediction first runs well past the official delay — and only when it gets worse, never when it improves. The airline’s own update is always authoritative once it posts.

Gate & Baggage

Terminal, gate, and baggage claim appear on the airport cards inside the expanded row (and on the map’s info panel) as soon as the airline publishes them. The gate sits on a yellow gate-sign plate; baggage claim is led by a blue suitcase. Gates are often assigned close to departure and baggage claim usually appears around touchdown, so a card may be blank until then. Changes send a push notification if you have alerts on.

Turbulence Strip

The progress bar inside an expanded row is tinted with the turbulence forecast along the route, left (departure) to right (arrival). Blank means smooth air; warmer colors mean stronger forecast turbulence — see the turbulence color scale.

Each point is read at the altitude the aircraft will actually be at there, so the ends of the strip reflect the lower altitudes of climb-out and descent. The strip appears for flights in progress, and for upcoming flights once they come within the forecast’s reach (about 36 hours out). As always it’s a forecast based on the filed plan — see the turbulence FAQ.

Calendar Import & Sync

One-time import. In Settings → One-time import, tap Import from Google Calendar — or, on Android, Import from phone calendar, which reads every calendar synced to your phone, Outlook and Exchange included. Airside scans your events (decades back, plus upcoming) for anything that looks like a flight, shows what it found grouped by year, and adds nothing until you confirm. Flights you already have are skipped.

Past flights import free for any signed-in account, taken from the event text (the route must be spelled out, like BOS to LAX). With Airside Pro, each import is verified against live flight data and upcoming flights are added for live tracking. Google Calendar import reads your primary calendar only — Airside asks for the narrowest access that can read your events. If a flight you know is there never appears, use Reset calendar import in the Danger zone on the Advanced page of Settings.

Automatic sync (Airside Pro). Unlike the one-time import above, calendar sync needs a subscription to set up at all. In Settings → Calendar sync, the dropdown at the top of the card chooses where your flights are synced: No calendar sync, Google Calendar, or — in the Android app only — Local device calendar. Only one is active at a time, and switching away from Google Calendar disconnects it — reconnecting later means granting access again. For Google Calendar, tap Connect Google Calendar, then Select import calendars to pick which ones to import from. New flights found there are added on their own, and deleting a calendar entry removes the flight it created. Turn on Update imported calendar entries to have delayed flights move their calendar entry to the new times. Export to calendar picks one calendar to receive an entry per saved flight, kept current automatically — point it at a calendar you share with family and everyone stays up to date. Each exported entry is titled with the flight and its route; a friend’s flight adds the friend’s name when you have given one and says “Friend flight” when you have not, and a flight in a named trip carries the trip name — so a shared calendar says whose trip it is and which journey it belongs to. Add user name… under the export calendar opens a box for your own name, and your own flights then carry it the same way, in the same parentheses; once you have set one the button reads Modify user name…, and saving an empty box clears it again. Syncing runs on Airside’s servers, so it works while the app is closed.

Local device calendar is the Android alternative, for calendars that live on the phone rather than in a Google account — a work calendar synced through Outlook, say. It offers the same three controls as Google Calendar: Select import calendars picks which of the phone’s calendars Airside scans for flights (new ones are added on their own, and deleting an entry removes the flight it created), Update imported calendar entries moves those entries when a flight is delayed, and Export to calendar picks one calendar to receive an entry per saved flight, titled exactly as the Google export would be, with the same Add user name… box beside it. Choosing this option asks for the phone’s calendar permission. The one real difference is when it happens — no server can reach a calendar on your phone, so Airside brings everything up to date when the app launches, when you return to it, when you tap Sync now, and whenever a saved flight changes while it is open, rather than while it is closed.

Sharing a Flight

Share in a row’s overflow (⋮) menu creates a live link. Anyone you send it to can watch that flight on the map — no account needed. Sharing requires Airside Pro; opening a shared link does not.

Map

The Map shows live aircraft, weather, and the route of whatever flight you have selected, in 2D or on a 3D globe.

Getting Around

Flight Search

The search panel at the top-left takes a flight number (UAL123) or plain English (flights from SFO to LAX today). Press Enter and tap a result to draw that flight’s route on the map. Results are labelled EN ROUTE, SCHEDULED, or PAST, with times in the departure airport’s local zone. The clock icon holds your last 10 searches, shared with the Add Flight search.

Queries it understands:

• AS 735, Alaska Airlines flight 735 — one flight, by airline and number; add a date (AS 735 on 3/2/2024) for a specific day.
• SFO, KSFO, Boston — an airport code or a city on its own is not a flight search at all: the map flies to that airport and frames the field.
• BOS to LAX — by origin and destination.
• flights from SFO to LAX today — limited to a day.
• united from JFK to LAX — filtered by airline.
• delta from ATL tomorrow — departures on a given day.
• flights from ORD between 8am and 12pm — a time window.
• flights from BOS this morning — also this afternoon and this evening.

Use IATA (SFO), ICAO (KSFO), or city names (Boston to LAX, NYC to Vegas) — mix them freely. You need at least an origin, destination, or airline; leave out the date and it searches today. Major US carriers are recognized by name; any airline works by its two-letter code (AS, BA) or ICAO code (UAL, BAW).

The selected flight is drawn as a dashed filed route with a green origin, a red destination, and blue waypoints; an airborne flight also shows its flown track in orange. A selected aircraft stays visible and live even when other aircraft are hidden.

Map Type & Overlays

Two buttons sit in the top-right corner of the map. The upper one, the map-type button (a thumbnail of the current map), opens the Map type sheet, which picks the base map. The lower one, the map-features button (a stack of layers), opens the Map features sheet, which switches each layer on and off. Your choices are saved.

• Airports — airport markers, drawn as you zoom in; see Map Layers & Airspace.
• Airspace — Class B, C and D boundaries around major airports (3D volumes with 3D airspace on in Settings).
• IR Satellite — worldwide cloud tops; brighter means colder and higher.
• Radar — worldwide precipitation.
• SIGMETs — red 3D volumes over areas of severe turbulence or thunderstorms.
• AIRMETs — orange 3D volumes over forecast turbulence areas.
• PIREPs — dots showing turbulence pilots actually reported; see the legend.
• Turbulence Map — the forecast heatmap, drawn at your selected flight’s cruise altitude.
• Place labels — place names drawn over the map as their own layer, so they read clearly and can be switched off: cities and towns, and on Relief the boundaries as well, since that map draws none of its own. Only the Simple, Relief and Satellite map types support it; the other map types and the aviation charts come with their own labels already printed on them. On Simple, region and water names (state and province names, bays and sounds) are part of the map image itself and are always shown.

See Weather & Turbulence for how to read them.

View Buttons

• North ↑ — turn the view so north is up.
• Country overview — zoom out to frame your country; the button carries its two-letter code (CONUS in the US).
• My location — center on where you are.
• Spin — rotate the camera automatically (3D only). You can still zoom in and out while it spins; every other camera gesture waits until you stop it.
• 2D / 3D — flat map or globe.
• Window view — with a live en-route flight open, a two-half pill appears next to Track. Tap the half for the side of the plane you’re sitting on and the map highlights the ground visible out that window. Tap it again to leave.

Home View

The map opens on your home view every launch. Until you set one, it starts on your country. Right-click the map (or press and hold on a phone) for Go to home view, Set as home view, and Clear home view. It’s saved to your account, so it follows you to every device.

A home view saved from a tilted 3D camera keeps its tilt in 3D. In 2D the map is always straight down, so it centres on the spot the tilted camera was looking at rather than the spot it was standing over — both views open on the same place.

The same menu works on the Travels globe, and Travels keeps a separate home view of its own: setting one there leaves the map’s untouched, and the other way round. Once set, it becomes the view Travels opens on instead of a fit around your flights — though within a session, switching back and forth between Map and Travels still returns to the view you left. Tap the travel-stats pill any time to re-fit the globe to your flights.

Info Panels

Tap an aircraft to open its panel in the top-right: route, aircraft type, status, progress, altitude, speed, heading, and scheduled times (an estimated arrival is marked (EST)). Two buttons at the bottom: Track follows the aircraft as it flies, and Show Route frames the whole route. Use the collapse arrow to roll the panel up, or × to deselect.

Tap an airport marker for its name, codes, and the current conditions from its latest weather report (METAR): the flight category with ceiling and visibility, then temperature and wind, and any present weather; a terminal forecast — the airport’s TAF cut into the periods of the next twelve hours as a small table, a row per period giving the hour it begins and that period’s flight category, wind and weather (a 30% chance or at times marks a passing change) so the change coming is read against what is there now; and any active FAA delays with their reason. With Show flights on airport click on in Settings (Pro), the panel also counts the flights currently arriving and departing, and while it is open the map shows only those flights. Tap a weather feature — PIREP, SIGMET, or AIRMET — and a small bubble opens on the map with what it reports, its altitudes, and how old it is. The bubble never disturbs an open flight; dismiss it by tapping it, clicking elsewhere, or pressing Esc.

Timeline

With a flight selected, a timeline scrubber runs along the bottom from wheels up to wheels down — the flight itself, not the taxi at either end — with the forecast surface weather under each airport code. The two times at its ends are those runway times. (The gate times are on the flight’s card.) The scrubber holds at the wheels-up end until the aircraft is actually airborne, then advances with the clock.

• Drag it to move through the flight; a cyan marker shows where the aircraft is expected to be at that moment (or where it actually was, when scrubbing into the past).
• Weather follows the flight’s time. Hazards that aren’t valid then are hidden, the turbulence forecast switches to the map published for it, and radar and satellite — which only ever show now — drop out once you’re more than six hours away.
• Live — tap it (or double-tap the slider) to snap back to real time.
• The slider is the turbulence strip. Its track is tinted with the route’s turbulence forecast, like the strip on a flight row. While the flight is in the air it is read at the altitude the aircraft is actually flying — the one shown in the panel — and refreshed from the latest forecast maps every few minutes, so a step climb into smoother or rougher air shows up without reopening the flight.

Map Layers & Airspace

Turn on the Airspace map feature to draw Class B, C, and D boundaries (as 3D volumes with 3D airspace on in Settings):

With the Airports map feature on, airport markers appear as you zoom in and are tinted orange through red by FAA delay severity. Turn on Color airports by conditions to tint every other airport by the flight category of its latest surface weather report (METAR):

An airport with an active FAA delay keeps its delay color — the delay program is the fact, the weather is usually its cause. An airport with no report stays its ordinary gray — gray means “not reported” here, never “fine”, so any other color is a report actually read. Observations are only fetched for the airports on screen, and refresh every ten minutes.

Weather & Turbulence

Airside draws on NOAA and FAA aviation weather. Everything refreshes on its own — radar and hazards every few minutes, satellite every ten, the turbulence forecast every fifteen.

• Satellite IR — a seamless worldwide infrared mosaic showing cloud-top temperature; brighter means colder and higher tops. Turn on Colorize satellite in Settings to tint the coldest, most convective tops on a temperature ramp — pale yellow through orange and red to magenta for the very coldest, storm-topping cells.
• Radar — worldwide precipitation reflectivity.
• SIGMETs — red volumes marking active turbulence and severe-thunderstorm advisories, extruded to the altitudes they cover.
• AIRMETs — orange volumes marking forecast turbulence areas, high and low.
• PIREPs — what pilots reported in the last two hours, drawn at the altitude reported. Tap a dot to read it.
• Turbulence forecast — a heatmap from NOAA’s turbulence models, shown at your selected flight’s cruise altitude (or a typical airliner cruise level with nothing selected).

With a flight selected, every overlay describes that flight’s moment rather than right now, and anything with no valid data for that time is hidden rather than shown wrong.

METAR & Flight Categories

A METAR is an airport’s routine surface weather observation — wind, visibility, cloud layers, temperature, pressure — issued about once an hour, and more often when conditions are changing quickly. It describes what is happening at the field itself, which is what decides how aircraft can get in and out.

A TAF (terminal aerodrome forecast) is the same airport’s forecast in the same terms — wind, visibility, weather and cloud — issued four times a day for the next 24 to 30 hours and amended when the weather departs from it. It is written as a series of periods, each in force from a stated hour, with passing changes marked as temporary or given a probability. The airport panel shows the periods of the next twelve hours.

Two of its numbers do most of that deciding: the ceiling (the height of the lowest broken or overcast cloud layer) and the visibility. Together they put the airport in one of four flight categories:

• VFR — Visual Flight Rules. Clear enough that pilots can navigate and stay clear of other traffic by eye. Ceiling above 3,000 ft, visibility over 5 sm.
• MVFR — Marginal VFR. The in-between band: legal to fly visually, but closing in.
• IFR — Instrument Flight Rules. Too poor to fly by eye. Arrivals have to fly a published instrument approach, following radio navigation down to a decision height where the runway either is or isn’t in sight.
• LIFR — Low IFR. Worse still, and close to the minimums below which an approach may not be attempted at all.

A point worth knowing: airliners file IFR for essentially every flight, fair weather or foul. So the category doesn’t say whether your flight may go — it says how much work each arrival takes, and therefore how many of them the airport can take per hour.

Why IFR airports develop delays. In good weather controllers can let pilots see and follow each other, run approaches to several runways at once, and keep arrivals tightly spaced. Once the field goes IFR none of that holds: every arrival has to be sequenced onto an instrument approach, separated by radar with a wider margin, and given room for the possibility of a missed approach. Some runway combinations stop being usable together. The airport’s arrival rate falls — often well below the number of flights the schedule already has pointed at it.

The backlog surfaces as airborne holding, then as FAA ground stops and ground-delay programs that hold departures at their origin, which is the cheaper place to wait. And because an aircraft flies several legs a day, a morning of low ceilings at a hub turns into late departures far from the weather that caused them. That is why a red or magenta airport on the map is often an airport that is about to run late, and why an airport’s FAA delay color and its weather color usually agree — see Delay Prediction for what Airside does with that.

Turn on Color airports by conditions in Settings to tint airport markers this way; Map Layers & Airspace has the exact color and threshold for each category.

Turbulence Colors

One scale, NOAA’s own colors for its global WAFS turbulence forecast, is used everywhere — the map overlay, the timeline, and the strip on a flight row all draw the very same pixels. It runs from yellow-green through yellow to orange, so you’ll see shades in between these landmarks. The forecast quantity is EDR (eddy dissipation rate, the aviation standard measure of how turbulent the air itself is, independent of any aircraft). What an EDR value feels like depends on the aircraft: the wording below uses the Aviation Weather Center’s thresholds for a medium-weight airliner — the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 family, and business jets.

Bigger aircraft feel less: a 777 or A380 needs roughly a quarter more EDR than a 737 to reach each of these categories. Small aircraft feel more. (EDR is quoted as the cube root of the dissipation rate, in m^2/3 s^-1; NOAA’s legend multiplies it by 100, so its “20” is 0.20 here.)

PIREP Legend

Each dot is a pilot report, colored by intensity. Turbulence (TURB) reports show a double chevron, chop (CHOP) a single one, and smooth air an open ring. Smooth-air reports are included by default; turn off Smooth air PIREPs in Settings → Advanced to hide them.

Travels

Travels draws every flight you’ve saved on one 3D globe, each as an arc bowing up off the surface — the actual recorded track for flights you’ve taken, the great-circle path for ones still to come. Lines are colored by status, with a legend in the corner.

Tap any arc or endpoint to open that flight on the map, and use the recenter button to frame everything again.

Travels remembers its own base map. The map-type button is the same one the map uses, but a map picked here applies to Travels only — so you can keep the map on the quiet Simple canvas for tracking and put Satellite or Relief under your arcs, without either choice disturbing the other. Until you pick one, Travels simply follows the map. Only the five base maps are offered here; the aviation charts cover the United States only, so they mean nothing under a whole-world globe. The theme, place labels and 3D terrain stay shared settings.

Settings

Account & Language

Sign in with Google unlocks Airside’s flight-data features and syncs your flights and preferences across devices automatically. Sign out disconnects sync; your settings stay on this device. Push-notification preferences are deliberately per device and never sync.

Your subscription is tied to your account, so a subscription bought on Android works on the web too. The Free/Pro badge shows on every platform; the Upgrade and Manage buttons beside it are Android-only, since a subscription is bought and cancelled through Google Play. Subscribing needs a signed-in account: if you haven’t signed in yet, tapping Upgrade signs you in first.

You can delete your account from inside the app at any time: Delete account… in the Danger zone on the Advanced page. It removes the account and everything under it, and it does not cancel a subscription — see the Danger zone for what goes and what doesn’t.

Language sets the app’s language, or follows your device when left on System default.

Display

• Theme — Dark, Light, or follow your system.
• Time — 12-hour, 24-hour, or Zulu (UTC). The first two always show a time-zone abbreviation, so a time is never ambiguous.
• Units — miles or kilometres.
• Show location — your position as a blue dot on the map. Free, and stays on your device.
• 3D terrain — streams real elevation so mountains and high-altitude airports rise off the map and a landing aircraft meets its runway. Aircraft altitudes are sea-level (MSL) figures, so without terrain a flight into Denver appears to hover a mile above the ground until it lands. It costs graphics memory and bandwidth, it is never drawn in 2D or on the Travels globe, and it starts off. Requires Airside Pro.

Map & Aircraft

• Icons — draw aircraft as a simple Dot or an Aircraft symbol (default) pointing the way it’s heading.
• Data blocks — show or hide the callsign labels next to each aircraft; Data block font sets their size.
• Color by altitude — tint aircraft and trails by altitude band instead of your accent color.
• Color airports by conditions, 3D airspace — how the airport and airspace layers are drawn; the layers themselves are switched on from the map’s Map features sheet, and see Map Layers & Airspace. Coloring airports by conditions tints each one by its latest weather report — what that means, and why the red ones tend to run late, is in METAR & Flight Categories. Color airports by conditions and Show flights on airport click only show something with the Airports feature on, and 3D airspace with Airspace on.
• Show flights on airport click — with it on, tapping an airport also fetches the flights currently arriving there and departing from it, draws them on the map, and counts them in the airport’s panel (see Info Panels). Off, the panel shows the airport’s own conditions, forecast and delays only. Requires Airside Pro: each airport tap is a live traffic search.
• Route turbulence — the turbulence tint on progress bars and the timeline.
• Aircraft diagrams — draw the aircraft type’s side profile in an expanded flight in Flight Details — on the aircraft card of an upcoming or active flight, and above the details of a past one. One drawing stands for a whole family, so every variant shares it, and a type we do not draw yet borrows the closest matching silhouette. Starts off. Requires Airside Pro.
• Weather overlay — Opacity for all weather imagery, and Colorize satellite for the temperature ramp on cloud tops. (Radar thinning moved to Advanced.)
• 3D display — Rotation speed for the Spin button and Vertical exaggeration (1–10×) to exaggerate altitudes — aircraft, trails and terrain together — so vertical separation reads more clearly.
• Search defaults — an airline and departure airport to prefill the Add Flight form. Its own page, opened from the row of that name near the foot of the settings list.

Calendar

Their own page, opened from Calendar sync near the foot of the settings list: two separate cards, both covered in full under Calendar Import & Sync.

• One-time import — scans a calendar once and adds the flights it finds. Free for any signed-in account; the button reads Import from Google Calendar, with Import from phone calendar alongside it on Android.
• Calendar sync (Airside Pro) — keeps a calendar and your flights in step on their own. The dropdown at the top picks which calendar: Google Calendar, which syncs while the app is closed, or Local device calendar on Android, which is brought up to date whenever Airside is running. Whichever you pick, Select import calendars chooses what to scan, Update imported calendar entries lets a delayed flight move its calendar entry, and Export to calendar writes an entry per saved flight into one calendar of your choosing. Sync now runs a pass immediately, and setting the dropdown back to No calendar sync revokes Airside’s access and stops everything. (A separate Disconnect calendar sync button appears only if a subscription lapsed while a connection was still held — revoking access never requires Pro.)

Notifications

Its own page, opened from the Notifications row at the head of the sub-page links on the settings list.

The master Push notifications switch is per device — each phone, tablet, or browser decides for itself. Turning it on for the first time asks for the system notification permission.

You may get alerts for:

• Delays & cancellations on a saved flight departing within 24 hours.
• Gate & baggage changes.
• Arriving soon — about 30 minutes from landing.
• Friend flight landed — handy when you’re heading out to pick someone up.
• Incoming flight landed — the aircraft for your own upcoming flight has arrived.
• Flight departed, and a one-off tracking started confirmation when you add a flight.

Delay change to notify sets how much a flight’s delay must move since the last alert before you get another — one setting for friends’ flights, one for your own, from Any change up to 45 minutes. Cancellations and diversions always come through. When a delay leaves less than 45 minutes to make a connecting flight you have saved, the alert says so. Unlike the on/off switch, these apply to every device on your account.

On Android, each alert type is its own system notification category — tap Notification categories to mute individual types or change their sound. A live flight status card also appears in the notification shade around each of your own flights, showing boarding time, gate, and expected departure, then the arrival gate and baggage claim. In a browser it’s all-or-nothing: the master switch is the only control.

UI Color

Set the accent color separately for dark and light mode: tap a swatch, or use the picker at the end of the row for a custom color. Drag one swatch onto another to swap them. Your palette syncs with the rest of your settings, and travels in the backup that Export writes.

Advanced

Its own page, opened from the Advanced row at the foot of Settings. It holds the switches that only mean something once you know what they change — almost every one starts off, and every one carries a line explaining what it does — and, below them, the Danger zone. One page for the two kinds of thing you should only touch on purpose. The arrow beside the page title takes you back to the Settings list.

Under Advanced settings:

• Text size — how large the app’s text is drawn.
• Volume edges — outline every 3D volume on the map: airspace, and SIGMET and AIRMET hazard areas alike. Starts on.
• Pilot report labels — print each pilot report's aircraft type and altitude next to its dot.
• Smooth air PIREPs — include pilot reports of no turbulence; see PIREP Legend.
• Radar thinning — strip ground clutter and the faintest returns out of the radar tiles so only real precipitation is drawn. The one switch here that starts on: turning it off shows the raw tiles, haze and all.
• Mute map colors — tone down the base map so aircraft and weather stand out: lighter satellite imagery, paler colors on the charts.
• Low graphics mode — render the map at a lower resolution to use less graphics memory. Turn this on if the map goes blank or crashes.

Under Experimental features — features still being finished, so expect rough edges. Each starts off:

• 3D turbulence maps — stack the turbulence forecast as translucent surfaces at each flight level instead of one flat overlay. Demanding on graphics memory.
• 3D clouds — lifts the IR Satellite Imagery overlay off the map and draws it as a cloud layer at 30,000 ft, at the same transparency as the flat overlay. Needs IR Satellite Imagery on in the map picker. A first cut: one layer at one altitude.

Danger Zone

At the foot of the Advanced page, under that page’s switches. These either overwrite what you have, throw it away, or end the account outright, which is not something to meet while scrolling past the theme picker.

• Export — everything under your account (settings plus saved flights) as one airside_data.json backup. On Android it goes to the share sheet.
• Import — restore from an exported file; flights not already in your account are added back.
• Reset calendar import — forget the calendar entries Airside couldn’t match, and the imported flights you later deleted, so both are offered again on the next scan.
• Defaults — reset every setting.
• Delete account… — permanently delete your Airside account and everything in it: your saved flights and travel history, your synced settings, the flights you follow for friends, every device’s notification registration, and your Google Calendar connection (revoked at Google, not merely forgotten). It cannot be undone, and you’ll be asked to sign in again first so we know it’s you. It does not cancel a subscription — Airside Pro is billed by Google Play or the App Store, so cancel it there or it keeps renewing. Shown only when you’re signed in.

Data Sources

Airside blends live ADS-B aircraft positions, airline flight plans and status, NOAA and FAA aviation weather (turbulence forecasts, PIREPs, SIGMETs, AIRMETs), FAA airport delay programs, worldwide radar and satellite imagery, surface weather, and VFR/IFR charts.

All of it is fetched through Airside’s own servers, so you never enter or manage API keys and provider credentials never reach your device. The full list of providers is in our Privacy Policy.

Terrain on the 3D map is Esri’s World Elevation (Terrain3D) service. Sources: Vantor, Airbus DS, USGS, NGA, NASA, CGIAR, GEBCO, N Robinson, NCEAS, NLS, OS, NMA, Geodatastyrelsen and the GIS User Community. Neither the 2D map nor the Travels globe draws terrain.

Credits

Base map tiles are provided by Esri. Depending on the map style you choose, imagery and data come from Esri, HERE, Garmin, USGS, NASA, NOAA, National Geographic, and the GIS User Community, along with © OpenStreetMap contributors.

VFR and IFR chart overlays are built from the FAA’s published aeronautical charts.

Global precipitation radar is provided by RainViewer, aggregating data from national weather services worldwide.