Skyty 1.3 — Live Events on the offline map
because you need to know what is happening below you while you fly.
Last Thursday, just after 22:00 UTC, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg in California, heading north. On a track that passed roughly 200 km east of an Alaska Airlines Seattle-San Diego flight. Thirty passengers on the left side could have watched the ascent. Nobody knew they should be looking.
Skyty 1.3 ships today. That is the problem we set out to solve.
Live Events — what you now see on the map
Four data categories overlay onto the offline map:
- Rocket launches from spaceports along your route. Source: Launch Library 2. Visibility windows are computed against your position.
- Aurora when a geomagnetic storm lights up the sky. Source: NOAA SWPC. Auroral oval rendered as a translucent band across the map.
- Active volcanoes with current eruption status. Source: NASA EONET.
- Recent earthquakes in the last 24 hours, magnitude 4.5 and above. Source: USGS.
Tap a pin and you get time, distance, short description. That is the entire interaction.
The trick is in the caching step. Before boarding, you tap a single “Pre-flight” button. Skyty pulls everything relevant for the next 24 hours into a local file. Once the cabin door closes, the Live Events layer runs completely offline. That is the whole point of Skyty: no magic in the air, just clean prep on the ground.
iPad — finally proper
The iPad has so far felt like an oversized iPhone. It was.
1.3 brings a real landscape layout with its own sidebar. Coordinates, metrics, Live Events and landmarks stay permanently visible on the left while the map fills the rest. The sidebar is not collapsible — it is just there.
Anyone who has ever tried to tap between “map” and “list of events” mid-flight on an iPad will know why this matters.
Two new themes
- Cockpit Amber — the classic warm NVG/HUD orange. If you have flown around older cockpits or anything military-aviation, you know the look. Cuts blue light, good for long night flights.
- Stealth — pure grayscale. No accent colours, no glow, just contours. For the people who want to be invisible in the cabin.
Four themes before — Aviation Dark, Aviation Light, Satellite, Topographic. Six now.
Plus: a bug that took a week to catch
Auto-recording occasionally lost recorded flights after an app restart. Reproduced on a TestFlight build, hunted for a week, found: a race condition between the persist layer and the auto-stop detection. Resolved.
Where to get it
App Store → Skyty → Update. If you have auto-updates on, you already have it.
Live Events comes free, no Premium upgrade required. Pre-flight Primer is a single tap in the main menu before take-off.
What is next
v1.4 is in the works and expands the event roster: solar eclipses (whose paths we already pre-compute), noctilucent clouds, satellite passes like ISS and Starlink trains. Plus a pre-flight primer refinement.
Until then: glance at your map on the next flight. Something might be launching.