Have you ever seen a plane overhead and felt a burning curiosity to know where on Earth it’s headed? It’s easy to find out with Flightradar24. With its up-to-the-minute flight status reports and hundreds of thousands of flights tracked daily, the app is great for frequent flyers, those looking to check an arrival time before picking someone up from the airport and the plane nerds fascinated by all things aviation.

What we love: The access to the real-time status of flights all over the world. We love looking up the details of planes we spot, then zooming out on the map to see international flight patterns. You can tap an individual plane to view specific details about it such as the airline operator, flight origin and destination, and aircraft model and manufacturer.

Quick tip: Try the app’s excellent AR feature. Switch to AR View and point your iPhone or iPad skywards to see the real-time location and flight details of passing jets. Alternatively, select a plane in the app and tap the “3D view” button to get a close-up virtual view of the aircraft in flight.

Meet the developer: Flightradar24 started as a hobbyist project in 2006, and the service was released as an iOS app four years later. Nowadays, it has more than four million users daily and tracks more than 200,000 flights per day.