You can finally catch the aircraft you see from the cockpit
Since Hamburg's sky went live you have been able to fly through real traffic at its real position. You could read the callsign off the plate, watch the gear come down, follow a jet onto its departure heading — and then do nothing at all with it. The collection lived on the radar map, the traffic lived in the sky, and the two never met.
They meet now. Zoom in on an aircraft, hold it in the crosshair until the lock goes green, and press P (or right-click — the same keys that take a screenshot). It goes into your dex, with its type, its airline and its rarity, exactly like a catch from the radar.
No daily limit here
The radar scan is capped because each scan is a paid request to an outside data provider. The sky in the simulator is not: it comes from the Skydex Feeder Network, our own receivers, and an aircraft you can see up there has already cost us nothing. Capping it would have been taxing something that is free.
So there is no daily cap on catching from the cockpit. There is a 60-second cooldown, and that one is not about money — it is there so an evening beside a busy runway does not turn your collection into a phone book. For the same reason the achievements behind this count distinct airframes, never the number of times you caught them: circling one tail earns you nothing.
You do have to actually identify the aircraft. A catch needs two things: the full plate has to be up (that is 9 km, the range where the callsign and type appear) and the optical zoom has to be engaged. If you can read who it is, you can catch it. That is the same ritual vessels have always had, and it is deliberate — spotting should cost a little attention.
The ones that were really overhead
Here is the part we care about most. When you catch an aircraft, the game quietly checks whether it was also over you — the real you, wherever you are actually sitting — and if it was, the card keeps that forever. It shows as a badge: 🛬 overhead ×3, with the date you first met.
The mark is upgrade-only. Catch a tail from the other side of the planet afterwards and it stays: you did stand under that aircraft once, and nothing later takes it away. It works the other way too, and that is the nicer half — an airframe you caught remotely months ago that finally passes over your head flips to overhead the moment you catch it again.
Three achievements sit on top: Directly Overhead for how many different aircraft have flown over you, Legend Overhead for the rare ones that did, and Foreign Skies for doing it in different countries. Volume is easy under a busy approach path, so the real prizes hang on the rare and the far-travelled, not on the count.
If your browser refuses to share your location, nothing breaks — you lose the badge, never the catch.
Familiar tails
One more small thing that changes how the sky feels. Aircraft you have caught before are now marked wherever they appear: on the radar, on the map, on the plate in the sim. seen 3× · overhead 1×. Unknown aircraft show nothing at all — the sky is not a checklist of what you have yet to collect, and we would like to keep it that way.
The nicest thing about this is entirely accidental: fly long enough over one city and you start recognising the regulars.
And this is the recruiting pitch
Anyone in the world can fly over a lit city and catch there. That is on purpose. It is the only honest way to show someone what their own sky is missing — not a landing page, but forty people in the air over somebody else's town. If you want that over your city, it takes one receiver.