Sky Radar now shows the whole sky — catch three per scan, and keep the receipts
Until today a Sky Radar scan behaved like a very picky assistant: it looked at the whole sky over you — often dozens of aircraft — and then showed you exactly three, chosen by rarity. The other forty were found, identified, and thrown away before you ever saw them. That made every scan feel smaller than it really was, and it hid a genuinely fun part of spotting: reading the whole sky and choosing your catch yourself.
That trimming is gone. A scan now surfaces every aircraft it found — privacy-filtered as before (light private aviation stays invisible, same stance we take with sailing yachts on AIS), enriched with type, airline and rarity, and sorted rarest-first so the good stuff still tops the list. Over a quiet field that might be four blips; over a hub it can be a hundred. The list scrolls, the map draws them all, and every single one is a real aircraft overhead right now.
What changed in exchange: catching is now the limited resource, not seeing. Each scan gives you a catch budget of three claims. Pick any three from the whole list — the three rarest, three liveries you're missing for an airline achievement, or that one turboprop you've never seen — and catch them. The counter shows in the scan results header, the Catch button greys out when the budget is spent, and the next scan resets it to three. Failed attempts don't burn a slot; only successful catches count.
Why three and not everything? Because catching is the game. If one scan could vacuum up the entire sky, a single tap over Frankfurt would fill your collection for the week and there would be nothing left to hunt. The scan's daily cap (currently eight) times three catches gives a generous but finite day — and choosing which three out of a hundred is exactly the kind of decision a collector should be making.
Cost-wise this is free: one scan is one API request whether it returns three aircraft or a hundred and fifty, so seeing more doesn't burn anything except your ability to pick favourites. The enrichment pipeline is bounded and cached, and if a truly absurd sky ever exceeds the bound, the trim is logged rather than silent.
Private aircraft: visible, but faceless
One class of aircraft used to vanish from scans entirely: light private aviation — Cessnas, gliders, balloons, anyone in the FAA's privacy programs. That's a person's aircraft, and a person's aircraft is personal data, so we refused to show it at all. The honest sky suffered for it: you could watch a glider circle overhead while the radar insisted the sky was empty.
Now the radar shows them — anonymously. A private aircraft appears as a small grey outline blip with nothing but position, altitude, speed and a coarse label like "glider" or "balloon". No registration, no callsign, no hex code, no exact type — nothing that points at a person. And they can't be caught: no card, no record, nothing stored. The privacy line stays exactly where it was — we never persist an identifiable private aircraft — but an ephemeral dot on your radar for sixty seconds identifies nobody, and it makes the scan tell the truth about the sky.
Your catch history
Until now, "when did I catch that A380?" had a fuzzy answer: the card remembers the first and the latest catch, and everything in between evaporated. The game now keeps a proper ledger — every successful claim is recorded with the moment it happened, the aircraft's name, type, airline, rarity, the XP it paid, and a ✨ mark when it minted a brand-new card.
The 🕘 button next to the scan button (on both maps) opens the panel: your last two hundred catches, newest first, each row linking to the aircraft's own page. It's the spotter's logbook — the thing every real plane spotter keeps in a worn notebook, except this one writes itself.
The change applies to both scan surfaces — the in-game map and the standalone map at /map. Scan, read the sky, pick your three.