One sky, four ways of reading it.

The nearest few aircraft, largest first, with the destination set as the headline because that is the thing people actually want to know. Ordering has hysteresis, so the screen does not reshuffle itself every two seconds as two aircraft trade places at nineteen kilometres.

The background follows the real sky: dawn, dusk, overcast, night. A lit cabin at midnight is true, so night styling applies to the aircraft as well as the ground.

Everything in range, positioned properly, with a short trail behind each aircraft and the livery drawn beside the one you select. Range rings at whatever radius the display is set to.

Map tiles are fetched once and cached on the unit, so a display that has been running a week makes no map requests at all. The basemap ships with the product rather than being rented by the view.

A plan position indicator: phosphor green on black, north up, a beam that paints each target as it passes and lets it decay behind. Bearing and range come straight off the receiver, so it is the same information as the map in the form people recognise as radar.

Emergency squawks, military traffic and anything unusually low are given their own emphasis. Under a reduced-motion preference the sweep stops and every target is painted at full brightness instead.

Arrivals and departures at an airport you choose, derived from what the aircraft themselves broadcast. It reports what happened rather than what was scheduled, so it needs no commercial schedule feed and never shows a flight that was cancelled an hour ago. An aircraft that is not transmitting does not appear, here or anywhere else in the product.

Arrivals read inward and departures read outward, so direction is carried by the layout instead of an icon. Cargo is not a special case: a DHL 767 at half past two goes through the same logic as a Jet2 757 at midday.

Every other screen answers what is there now. This one looks backwards: first sightings, visit counts, closest approach, furthest range, accumulating from the day the unit was switched on.

A record with no reading is left out rather than shown as a zero, because an aircraft that never reported its altitude is not an aircraft at ground level. On a unit switched on an hour ago most of this screen is legitimately empty, and it says so.