Airside

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 — a flight number like AAL77, or plain English: BOS to LAX, to JFK, United from SFO tomorrow. 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.

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 joins the row’s date and flight number, 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 row shows the airline logo, the route, the flight number, a status badge, and a friendly date (Tomorrow · 2:35 PM — a flight today shows just the time). When a flight is delayed the date shows the expected departure, not the stale scheduled one. A colored dot marks a flight whose data changed since you last looked; it clears when you expand the row or leave the screen.

The row also adapts to where the flight is. Inside 24 hours of departure it adds a line beneath the departure time: the estimated boarding time with the departure gate and terminal; once you’re aboard, the expected arrival; after landing, the arrival gate and baggage claim. It is always an addition — the line above it keeps telling you when the flight leaves. On your next flight — and only that one — that added line is written in purple, the same color the current stage of an expanded flight wears. Every other row, a friend’s flights included, states the same facts plainly: the color marks what is next, not everything that is happening. Expanding the row fades the line away entirely, because the full details below take over from there. 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. 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.
• 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 and baggage claim.
• 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.

Past flights show a simpler panel: the actual departure and arrival times and airports.

Status Badges

Trips

Group 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 Group.

A trip appears as one block with a header naming it, the route it takes (BOS/DCA/BOS), and its dates. It starts folded — tap the header to open it. The trip’s own menu offers Rename trip (leave the name empty to go back to automatic naming), Select flights, and Ungroup trip; to pull out one flight use Remove from trip in its own menu.

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.

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.

When the prediction runs meaningfully later than the official time, the row switches to our numbers: a Delay Likely badge, and the predicted departure and arrival with the scheduled times struck through beneath. 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 (roughly 18–36 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 — This device’s calendars. 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.

This device’s calendars is the Android alternative, for a calendar that lives on the phone rather than in a Google account — a work calendar synced through Outlook, say. Pick the calendar to export to and Airside keeps one entry per saved flight in it, titled exactly as the Google export would be, with the same Add user name… box beside it. There are no import calendars to choose here: reading flights out of the phone’s calendar is the one-time Import from phone calendar button above. The one real difference is when it happens — no server can reach a calendar on your phone, so Airside brings it up to date when the app launches, when you return to it, 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:

• 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 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

Tap the map-type button (the thumbnail near the bottom) to open the map sheet. The top half picks the base map; Map features below it switches the overlays on and off. Your choices are saved.

• 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.

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).
• 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.

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, the current flight category from its latest weather report, and any active FAA delays with their reason; while that panel is open the map shows only flights serving that airport. 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 departure to arrival, with the forecast surface weather under each airport code. It holds at the departure 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.

Map Layers & Airspace

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

With Major airports 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.

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, taken from NOAA’s forecast, is used everywhere — the map overlay, the timeline, and the strip on a flight row. It’s continuous, so you’ll see shades in between these landmarks.

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 off by default; turn on Smooth air PIREPs in Settings → Advanced to include 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.

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.

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

Display

• Theme — Dark, Light, or follow your system.
• Clock — 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.
• Text size — how large the app’s text is drawn.
• Show location — your position as a blue dot on the map. Free, and stays on your device.

Map & Aircraft

• Icons — draw aircraft as a simple Dot (default) or an Aircraft symbol 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.
• Airports, Color airports by conditions, Airspace, 3D airspace — what to draw on the map; 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. A setting that needs another one stays greyed out until you turn that one on: Color airports by conditions needs Airports, and 3D airspace needs Airspace.
• Volume edges — outline every 3D volume on the map: airspace, and SIGMET and AIRMET hazard areas alike.
• Route turbulence — the turbulence tint on progress bars and the timeline.
• Weather overlay — Opacity for all weather imagery, Radar thinning to strip ground clutter, and Colorize satellite for the temperature ramp on cloud tops.
• 3D display — Rotation speed for the Spin button, and Magnify height (1–10×) to exaggerate altitudes 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 synchronization 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 This device’s calendars on Android, which is brought up to date whenever Airside is running. 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. 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 are experimental or only mean something once you know what they change — 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.

• 3D turbulence maps — stack the turbulence forecast as translucent surfaces at each flight level instead of one flat overlay. Demanding on graphics memory.
• 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.
• Mute map colors — desaturate the base map so aircraft and weather stand out.
• 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.

Danger Zone

At the foot of the Advanced page, under that page’s switches. These four either overwrite what you have or throw it away, 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.

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.

The side-view aircraft drawings on expanded flight cards are by Julien Scavini (Wikimedia Commons), licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.