A tracker for the person waiting

Who it is for

Somebody meeting a relative, collecting a friend, or waiting to hear that a partner has landed. Not a controller, not a spotter, not an analyst. That choice decides everything else about it.

What it deliberately is not

• Not a global radar. It never shows fifteen thousand aircraft on one map.
• Not an aviation analytics platform, and not a replacement for official airline or airport information.
• Not a way to follow military, government or private aircraft — it works from commercial flight numbers and commercial airport boards.
• Not a booking, rebooking or price comparison service.

One flight at a time

Choosing a single flight and building a proper experience around it is both the better interface and the cheaper architecture. Nothing is polled unless somebody is looking at it, and everyone looking at the same flight shares one request upstream.

Honesty as a design rule

A marker moves only when a receiver heard it move. An estimate is labelled an estimate. A field that cannot be known is named, with the reason, rather than left as an empty box. The homepage animation says “demonstration” on it.

MJ Apps

FlightStatus is one of a small set of single-purpose tools that run in the browser and ask for nothing. Its sibling Picsizer resizes images locally with no upload and no account.