Almost always, the answer is no, it’s an airliner, a trainer, or a medevac doing exactly what it should. But a few aircraft genuinely deserve a second look, and there are concrete, checkable signals that separate them from the noise. Here’s how to read your sky calmly and correctly.
An aircraft circling, flying low, or lacking a familiar airline name is usually benign: a flight-training circuit, a helicopter on a survey, an air ambulance, a police or news helicopter, or simple holding under ATC. AeroScope exists to help you confirm that quickly, and to flag the genuine exceptions, using transparent signals rather than guesswork.
An ICAO address in a known military block, corroborated by callsign, a heavily weighted factor. See military tracking.
7500 (hijack), 7600 (radio failure) or 7700 (general emergency) is the clearest real signal there is. See squawk codes.
Sustained circling or a racetrack over one spot can indicate survey, surveillance or holding, classified automatically by pattern-of-life.
A track that fails its integrity checks may be spoofed rather than threatening. See detect spoofing.
AeroScope rolls these into a 0–100 attention score so the few aircraft worth a look rise to the top. See threat scoring.
Work through these before concluding anything. Most concern dissolves at step one or two.
| 1 | How high is it? Above roughly 30,000 ft it is an overflight passing through your region and has nothing to do with you. Below about 3,000 ft and slow, it is approach, training, a helicopter or survey work. |
|---|---|
| 2 | What shape is it flying? A straight line is transit. Repeated circuits near an airfield are training. A wide racetrack is usually holding or refuelling. See why a plane is circling. |
| 3 | Who operates it? Type and operator resolve for most aircraft. A police, medical, news or survey operator explains almost every low, persistent presence. |
| 4 | What do the factors say? Open the attention score and read the contributing factors rather than the number. The reasons tell you far more than the total. |
| What you noticed | Usual explanation |
|---|---|
| Circling overhead for a long time | Aerial survey or mapping, police or news orbit, pilot training, medevac holding, or ATC holding during congestion. |
| Flying very low | On approach or departure, or a helicopter operating legitimately at low level such as an air ambulance or a powerline patrol. |
| No name or operator shown | Private aircraft, a gap in registry data, or a state aircraft. Missing information is common and is not itself suspicious. |
| Military type overhead | Transit along an established route, training, or a refuelling track. See military planes over my house. |
| Appeared then vanished from the map | Almost always a coverage gap rather than anything the aircraft did. See coverage. |
| An emergency squawk | A genuine declaration by the crew, and the system working exactly as intended. It is being handled by air traffic control, who know far more than any tracker. |
There is a narrow set of circumstances where acting is appropriate, and a much larger set where it is not.
Worth reporting: an aircraft in visible distress, signs of an accident, or a drone operating dangerously close to an airport or over a crowd. Contact local emergency services, or the national aviation authority for a drone or airspace complaint. They have radar, radio and legal authority. A public tracker has none of those.
Not worth acting on: a high attention score by itself, a military aircraft transiting, an aircraft with no operator listed, or a track that disappeared. None of these indicate a problem, and confronting or publicising individuals based on flight data is both unreliable and harmful.
The honest framing is that this platform is a tool for understanding, not for enforcement. It sees only what is broadcast, cannot verify authenticity with certainty, and is explicitly not suitable for operational use.