The Stillness Before You See It
There is a particular kind of stillness that happens when you hear a plane before you see it. A low hum, growing. Your head tilts back almost on its own. And then it appears, a silver shape catching the light, dragging a white line across the blue, gone again in a few seconds.
I have been chasing that feeling since I was a kid.
Plane spotting was never a hobby with a name for me growing up. It was just what I did. I would hear the distant drone of an engine and run outside, craning my neck, trying to guess the airline from the tail colors before it disappeared behind a building. There was no app for that. There was just instinct, and luck, and the sky.
SkyStory is my attempt to give that feeling back to anyone who has ever looked up. Except this time, the sky reaches out to you first.
Flipping the Whole Thing Around
Every flight tracking app I had ever used worked the same way. You spot a plane, you get curious, you open the app, you search, you find it. The moment of wonder always came before the app, never because of it.
I wanted the opposite. I wanted my phone to know there was a plane nearby and tell me, a quiet little nudge: look up, something is crossing over you right now. Not me chasing the sky. The sky chasing me.
That single inversion is the entire soul of SkyStory. The app watches the sky near you and pushes a notification the moment something interesting passes overhead, even if you never opened it that day. When you do open it, you get a small AI-written story about that specific flight: where it came from, where it is headed, what kind of aircraft it is, the quiet improbability of a few hundred people sitting in a metal tube seven miles above your head while you stand on a sidewalk looking up.
Why This Is Different
Most flight trackers assume you already know what you are looking for. You hear a plane, you wonder what it is, you open an app, you search. The app is reactive. It waits for your curiosity before it does anything.
SkyStory does not wait. It assumes the wonder has not happened yet, and it tries to create the moment rather than respond to it. That is a small shift in logic but it changes the entire relationship between you and the sky. Instead of being someone who occasionally checks an app out of curiosity, you become someone who gets interrupted by the sky itself, mid-walk, mid-conversation, mid-whatever you were doing, with a small nudge that says something worth noticing is happening above you right now.
And it does not just tell you a flight number and an altitude. It tells you a story. A few sentences that turn a row of anonymous flight data into something that feels like a moment, a reminder that the metal shape overhead is carrying actual people somewhere, away from somewhere, for reasons you will never know but can imagine for a second.
Why I Built It
I think we have trained ourselves to stop looking up. The sky is full, every single day, of thousands of small miracles: strangers being carried across oceans, reunions in progress, goodbyes in progress, someone's first flight, someone's hundredth. Most of us walk underneath all of that without ever noticing.
SkyStory is my small, stubborn attempt to fix that. To take the kid who used to run outside at the sound of an engine, and build him a tool that does the running for him now, and maybe, along the way, get a few more people to tilt their heads back and watch something amazing cross the sky.
What I Want Next
What exists today is really just the first chapter. The version of SkyStory in my head is much bigger than what is live right now.
I want the stories to go deeper. Not just where a flight came from and where it is going, but genuinely interesting context: an aircraft with an unusual history, a route that says something about the world, a flight connecting two cities in a way that is quietly remarkable if you know what to look for. Some planes have stories worth knowing before they even take off. I want SkyStory to know which ones, and tell you.
I also want it to surface the genuinely rare and amazing nearby. A historic aircraft passing through. A private jet on a flight path that hints at something newsworthy. A cargo plane on a route that quietly explains something about how the world is connected right now. The kind of plane that, if you knew what it was, you would actually run outside for, the way I used to as a kid. Most people fly past or under remarkable things every single day without ever knowing it, and that gap between what is happening above us and what we actually notice is the entire reason this app exists.
And I want augmented reality, properly. Not a gimmick bolted on at the end, but the actual future version of this product. Imagine holding your phone up to the sky, and instead of just a dot on a flat map, you see the real plane, overlaid live, moving across your camera view exactly as it moves across the real sky above you, its story floating quietly beside it as it goes. You would not be checking an app. You would be looking through one, the way you look through a window, except this window tells you what you are seeing. That is the version of SkyStory I am actually building toward. Everything live today is just the groundwork for that.
If you want to follow along or try it for yourself:
🌐 Live app: skystory.space
A quick honest note before you go. The website has been crashing under heavier traffic than I expected, and I am actively working through it. If you try it and it does not load, that is why, not you. Fixes are coming soon.
And if you have ideas, things you wish it did, places it falls short, things that would make you actually use it daily, I would genuinely love to hear them. This is still very early, and the people who reach out at this stage end up shaping where it goes more than they probably realize.
Look up. Something is probably passing over you right now.
A Note From Me
If you read all the way to here, thank you. It means a lot, especially for this one.
This project started as a feeling I could not quite name, the one I used to get as a kid running outside at the sound of an engine, and turned into something I have spent months building alone, mostly at night, mostly figuring it out as I went.
I do not know yet if SkyStory becomes something bigger or stays a small, strange thing that a handful of people use. Either way, building it has already given me something. A reason to keep looking up.
If you try it, or have an idea for where it should go next, I would love to hear from you.
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See you in the next one.
Saral
