How to track your flight offline, with no wifi

Download the map before you fly

Offline map packs are downloaded by region while you still have wifi: a coarse world basemap that covers every flight anywhere, plus detailed packs for the North Atlantic, North Pacific, Europe, North America, South Asia, the Middle East, East and Southeast Asia, and Oceania.

The world basemap is free and downloads itself the next time the phone is on wifi. Regional packs come with Premium, or you can unlock one region by watching a single ad, and it stays unlocked.

Once a pack is on the device, the map draws entirely from local storage. Nothing is fetched in the air. If you forget to download anything at all, tracking still works: your position and route are drawn over a plain background instead of a map.

World basemap

About 60 MB

Regional packs

90 to 140 MB

Set up the route at the gate

Type your flight number while you still have a signal and SkyDot fills in the departure and arrival airports. The lookup is the one step that needs the internet, so do it before the doors close. If a flight is not found, pick the two airports from the 4,045 stored in the app.

Connections are one route rather than several. Add up to three stops and the map draws a great-circle line for each leg, and the distance and time remaining run along the whole trip rather than to the next airport.

You can also skip the route entirely. "Just show me where I am" tracks position, altitude and speed with no destination, which is useful when you are not sure of the routing or only want to see what is below.

Start tracking, then put the phone away

Tap Start tracking once you are on board. Tracking carries on in the background with the screen off, so the phone can go in a pocket for takeoff. On Android a silent notification shows the time remaining and the place below; on iPhone the app keeps its location session running in the background.

Progress is saved about every 15 seconds. If the phone restarts or the app is closed mid-flight, SkyDot picks the flight back up or asks whether to continue or save it.

What the flight HUD shows

Altitude, ground speed, heading, the town or sea you are over, distance flown, distance remaining, time to landing and an approximate arrival time in destination local time. Numbers come from the GPS fix, so they keep updating whether or not anything is reachable over the network.

The time to landing is worked out from the distance left along your route and your current ground speed. It is not an airline schedule, so it responds to a strong tailwind or a hold in real time, and it only appears once the aircraft is moving fast enough to give a sensible answer.

Landing saves the flight for you

Once the aircraft has been airborne, SkyDot watches for a sustained drop to taxiing speed and treats that as the landing. The flight is saved to your travel log with its distance, duration, top speed, maximum altitude and the countries it crossed, and the recap card opens.

Short hops are kept too. Anything that covered more than 40 km or climbed above 2,500 m counts as a flight. A session that never left the ground is discarded.

If the position stops moving

GPS needs a view of the sky, and the fuselage is metal. A window seat gets a fix quickly; a middle seat in the centre section can take several minutes, especially with no mobile data to speed up the first fix. Holding the phone near a window usually solves it.

If no fix arrives for fifteen minutes, SkyDot pauses tracking rather than draining the battery, and offers to resume or save what it has.

What it costs you in data

Nothing. No roaming charges, no inflight wifi purchase, no background sync. A tracker that pulls positions from a server has nothing to reach at cruise altitude.