Maps

Maps is a map for your organization with live aircraft on it. Open it at maps.cactive.com.au or from the app switcher.

Access

Every member has both: saved places and watches are personal unless you share them. Owners and admins can change anything shared with the organization.

The map

The sidebar holds Map, Watches (with your first watches and New watch), Groups and Notifications. It collapses to icons with the header button or ⌘B and opens as a sheet on phones.

The base map follows the app's light or dark theme on its own; Hybrid, Satellite and Terrain are one click away (top right). The layers menu turns aircraft, their trails and saved places on and off. Your last view, style and layers are remembered in this browser.

• Search: places and addresses (nearest to the map first), coordinates such as -37.8136, 144.9631 or 37.8136 S 144.9631 E, and aircraft by ICAO hex, registration or callsign. Pick a place to save it.
• Current location: the arrow button; it can keep following you.
• Measure: the ruler button, then click the map. Two points give a distance, three or more also the perimeter and area.

The map's data comes from Mapbox and OpenStreetMap; the "ⓘ" at the bottom right lists the credits and the Mapbox wordmark stays at the bottom left, as their terms require.

Emergency incidents (Australia)

The Incidents layer shows current incidents and warnings from Australia's state emergency agencies, refreshed every minute or two:

• Warnings carry their Australian Warning System level: Advice (yellow: stay informed), Watch and Act (orange: prepare to leave or take action now) and Emergency Warning (red: leave now or take shelter). Their warning areas are drawn in the same colour.
• Incidents without a warning (a fire being attended, a tree down, a road crash) are slate. Ones under control or safe are drawn fainter.
• Each has an icon for its hazard: bushfire, grass and scrub fire, planned burn, building fire, flood, storm and wind, tree down, heat, earthquake, tsunami, hazardous material, rescue, medical, road crash, power and others. Where they crowd, they gather into a circle with the count, coloured by the most severe one in it.

Filters narrow the layer to hazards and a minimum level. The list sorts what's in view by distance (from you or the middle of the map) or by level. Select one for its level and what the agency says to do, the description, status, size, agency, when it was last updated, the warning area, its changes so far, and a link to the agency's own page.

Maps restates the agencies' public information and is not a warning service: check the official source (the link on every item) and follow emergency services' directions.

Each feed's credit line and the time it was last read are shown with the data. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, and other Queensland incidents, are added once their agencies allow republishing; NSW floods and storms (NSW SES) once their feed is published.

Watch zones

A watch zone alerts you to incidents and warnings in an area. Watch Zones → New Zone:

• Where: draw an area, a radius around a point you click, a saved place or one of the organization's locations, Near me (around your phone, from the Maps app; a near-me zone is yours alone), or a whole state. A zone can have up to ten areas. An incident counts when it's inside, or its warning area overlaps.
• What: hazards (all by default) and the lowest level that counts: Incident (everything), Advice (default), Watch and Act or Emergency Warning.
• When: a new incident or warning, its level raised, its level lowered (also when it drops below your minimum), it ended, or its words updated at the same level. New zones alert on the first three.
• How: mobile push, web push, email and SMS, as for flight watches, to you, people you add and notification groups. Texts go only for the changes you pick (new and raised by default) at or above a level (Watch and Act by default); texts cost per message. Emergency Warnings that are new or raised arrive as time-sensitive notifications on iPhone, so they show during Focus.
• Quiet hours hold alerts between two times, except the levels you still want (Emergency Warning by default).

Alerts name the level, the hazard and place, what to do, how far it is from your zone's point and the agency, with a link to it on the map (people outside the organization get the agency's page). One change reaches you once, however many of your zones include it; the same incident at the same level doesn't alert you again for 30 minutes. When more than a few incidents change in one zone in the same minute (a storm front), they arrive as one alert listing them; Emergency Warnings still come on their own. A feed that stops answering keeps its last incidents rather than ending them, and a feed newly added doesn't alert everything it already has. Send test alert shows how the zone's alerts reach you; the zone's page lists its recent alerts and what was sent (kept 30 days, 7 for near-me zones). Zones are private unless shared with the organization; owners and admins can change shared ones.

Saved places and shared maps

Saved holds your maps: lists of places, each with its own pin colour and icon (places can have their own). Add a place puts a pin where you click; a search result can be saved too. Share a map with My organization or Anyone with the link: the link opens a read-only map at maps.cactive.com.au/s/… without signing in, and Make a new link stops the old one working.

Live aircraft

Aircraft come from an ADS-B network (adsb.lol by default; the credit is under the flights list and in the map's attribution). They're drawn by type (jets, heavies, turboprops, light aircraft, helicopters, gliders, balloons, drones, ground vehicles) pointing along their track and coloured by barometric altitude (red: an emergency squawk), with the last 15 minutes of track behind them, fading with age. Labels (callsign, else registration, else hex) show from city zoom; where they crowd, lower aircraft win. The selected aircraft is ringed, its trail drawn wider and the rest dimmed.

Select an aircraft for its type, registration ("not broadcast" when it isn't), callsign, ICAO hex, squawk, barometric altitude, ground speed, vertical rate, track and when it was last seen, and the road it's following when a watch tracks it on one. Follow keeps it centred; Replay plays back its recorded track over the last 30 minutes to 24 hours; Watch starts a watch for it.

How live it is: a single poller asks the network for the areas your organization's watches cover, plus the area anyone is looking at, every 15 seconds or so. Looking somewhere new adds that area for a few minutes, so the first update there can take up to a minute. Recorded tracks (for replay) are kept two weeks, for aircraft while a watch covers them.

Flight watches

Watches → New watch, or Watch on an aircraft.

What to watch: any mix of ICAO hex (7C6B2D), registration (VH-ABC), callsign (POL31) and type (A139). A trailing * matches prefixes (POL*). Types match inside the watch's areas (or anywhere polled when it has none). Any aircraft, an aircraft class (helicopters, light aircraft, turboprops, jets, heavy jets, gliders, balloons, drones) and no callsign match inside the watch's areas only, so they need one. Presets are lists the platform keeps (such as police and emergency callsigns); a watch using one follows changes to the list. Watching by hex works even when the aircraft doesn't broadcast its registration. Except rows take the same kinds: an aircraft matching any of them never matches the watch (callsign POL3* except POL31 and POL32, which have watches of their own). Exceptions are never looked up on their own.

Areas: presets (Victoria), circles or areas you draw on the map, Near a location (one of the organization's locations, with an alert distance) and Near me (around your phone; see Near me). They give Entered and Left events, decide where types match, and with Only aircraft inside these areas limit the whole watch.

Events:

Road following matches recent positions against OpenStreetMap freeways (motorways), highways (trunk roads) and, if you add them, main roads. Settings: corridor width each side of the road (250 m), heading tolerance (25°), how long it must follow (60 s, 70% of positions), repeat interval (5 minutes, 0 for none), how long off the road before it counts as left (90 s), and altitude and speed limits (below 6,000 ft, faster than 30 kt). Victoria's roads are loaded today; other regions are added on request.

New watches have every event on; watches made earlier keep what they had.

Notifications: Mobile push to the Maps app on your phones, Web push to browsers you turned on, email and SMS (phone calls aren't available yet). New watches use mobile push, web push and email, plus SMS for takeoff, landing, emergency and signal alerts when you have a verified number. Mobile push also lands in your inbox, and follows your notification settings for "Flight watch alert" in your account. An alert counts as sent by push only when a phone or browser was there to get it; the watch's events say when none was. Send test alert sends you a sample on the watch's channels and shows what each did. Your texts go to your account's primary verified number (add one under Phone in your account). A text is short: callsign (registration and, on takeoff, type), what happened, where (a named area of the watch, else the nearest major road), the time in the watch's time zone and a link to the aircraft on the map. Texts start with the watch's name in brackets ([Air Wing] ) unless you turn off Start texts with the watch name; Short texts fit one SMS part, the link without its label. While the platform's SMS account is in the provider's sandbox, only numbers verified with the provider receive texts; the watch editor and Groups say so. The watch notifies you (Notify me) and any notification groups you pick. Same event again after holds back repeats of the same kind for the same aircraft (road repeats have their own interval; emergencies always go). Quiet hours hold notifications between two times in a time zone, except emergencies unless you untick that. Events are kept 30 days on the watch's page, with what happened to each notification.

Interchanges come from the same OpenStreetMap roads: places where a freeway crosses or meets another named freeway or highway, or where a ramp named for a road leaves it (56 in Victoria). One road's carriageways and a road changing its name along the way (the Western Ring Road running on as the Metropolitan Ring Road) aren't interchanges. The check joins consecutive positions, so a pass between two reports counts. Watches made before this event existed have it on only if they had every other event on; new watches have it on.

When you make, restart or resume a watch you get alerts from, it confirms by push: what it tracks, which alerts go where, and the aircraft's state if it's in the live picture ("VH-YXH is airborne at 1,175 ft"). People added to or removed from a watch are told too, unless Tell people when they're added or removed is off.

Pause stops a watch without losing its settings.

Circling alerts

New circling alert makes a watch for circling only: any aircraft, a class (helicopters) or a preset, in an area, near a location or near you. Sensitivity: Sensitive (¾ of a turn within 3 km over 10 minutes), Normal (a turn within 2 km over 8 minutes) or Strict (two turns within 1.5 km over 8 minutes). It ignores circling above 5,000 ft (holding patterns) and within 3 km of an airfield (circuit training); hospital helipads still count. Also loitering catches searches, figure-eights and hovering that never make a full turn. Circling alerts go by push; tick SMS to text them too. Watches that follow many aircraft keep no history or flight log for an aircraft until it raises an alert.

Which aircraft

Every aircraft is told apart by its ICAO hex address, one per airframe. Callsigns and registrations aren't enough: several aircraft can fly under one operator's callsign pattern, callsigns are reused, and some aircraft broadcast neither (or are on a privacy list, so trackers show "N/A"). So:

• Each notification names the hex (A139 POL31 · 7C4EF4) and says what matched (callsign POL31, type A139).
• Two aircraft matching a watch at the same time (the same callsign twice, two of a type) are tracked, notified and logged separately.
• Lock to the first aircraft that matches pins the watch to the airframe that matched first; from then on only that hex counts. Unlock lets the next match pin again.

Lifetime

A watch can run forever, or:

An ended watch shows why it ended and can be restarted (its counters go back to zero; one whose end time has passed needs a new end time first).

Flight log

Each watch logs every flight of the aircraft it matches: from takeoff (or the first report in the air) to landing, a long loss of signal, leaving the watch's areas, or the watch ending. A log has the track, the watch's events and the roads followed with times. Keep logs 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, any number of days, or forever. Open a flight to see its track on a map, or download it as GPX, KML or CSV.

Locations

Locations are the organization's places (a base, a hospital, an airfield): a point and an on-site radius (300 m by default), within which someone counts as being there. A watch alerts near a location within its own alert distance (5 km by default). Anyone who can see Maps sees the locations; anyone who can change Maps adds them; their owner or an org admin changes or deletes them. A location used by watches can't be deleted until they stop using it. Moving one moves every watch that uses it. Changes are in the audit log.

A watch near a location tells its owner, the people you add (People, members of the organization) and its groups.

Near me (Maps app)

Near me alerts you when aircraft head toward, pass over or circle near you, from your phone's location in the Maps app. Turn it on in the app (Maps → Near me): while using Maps shares your location while the app is open; also in the background shares it when your phone moves a significant distance. A near-me watch is yours alone: private, sent only to you, and not visible to org admins. It keeps its Near me area (make a new watch for other areas), and its events are kept 7 days.

• What is stored: one current location per phone, to about 100 m (3 decimals), with its accuracy. No history: each report replaces the last. Not in logs, backups or the live map, and the areas polled for you are widened and rounded so the flight sources never see where you are.
• How long it counts: 30 minutes after the app last reported while open; in the background, 1, 6 or 24 hours after the last move (you choose). After that your near-me watches wait (Waiting for your location) and alert nothing.
• Accuracy: approach alerts need a location good to 1 km or better (turn on Precise Location); they work best at alert distances of 2 km or more.
• Your location in the Maps app (and in Maps on the web) shows the current location, your phones and which watches use it. Stop sharing on this phone, or Delete my location to remove everything. Signing the app out stops it too; a phone's background key stops working when its sign-in ends, and unused phones are forgotten after 30 days.
• Limits: near-me watches per person (across all your organizations) and a phone's background reports per hour; see Limits. Past the report limit the phone gets 429 until the hour ends.

One alert per aircraft and event

When several watches raise the same event for the same aircraft (a location's approach alert and yours, two watches on the same takeoff), you get one alert, within 5 minutes of each other (texts: the watches' longest repeat time, at least 20 minutes). If you're on site at a location when an aircraft heads toward it, its alert and your near-me alert are the same: you get the location's, naming the place, on every channel either would have used. When you aren't there they're about different places and both are sent. The other watches record the event as Already sent by another alert.

Notification groups

Groups collects people to notify. Members of the organization join at once. Anyone else (an email address and/or a phone number) gets a message asking them to confirm, by email or, with only a number, by text, and nothing is sent until they do (asked at most three times, an hour apart). Emails have a one-click unsubscribe link and header; the first text says to reply STOP to opt out, and the confirmation page has an unsubscribe button. Someone who unsubscribes can't be asked again by the same entry. Since they can't open Maps, their texts and emails link to a public page with the aircraft's position at that event on the map (no sign-in, nothing about the watch or its other recipients). For two hours after the event the page also follows the aircraft while it's in the live picture; the link expires after 7 days. Group members only get the channels you tick for them, within the watch's channels.

Notifications on your devices

Mobile push: install the Maps app on your phone, sign in and allow notifications (on a phone with only the Home app, alerts go there). Web push: open Notifications in the sidebar and turn on This browser (or Turn on here in a watch's Notifications card); on iPhone and iPad, add Maps to the Home Screen first (Share → Add to Home Screen) and turn notifications on from the installed app. The Notifications page lists your phones (name, app and version) and browsers (remove any you no longer use) and sends a test to both. Tapping a notification opens the aircraft on the map.

Live Activities (iPhone): when a watched aircraft takes off, the Maps app (or Home, without Maps) shows the flight on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island until it lands: callsign and type, climbing, cruising or descending, altitude, speed, heading, the road and suburb it's over ("Eastern Fwy · Box Hill North"), distance from the watch's area, time since takeoff and the latest event ("Circling near Kew"). It follows the phone's light or dark appearance on the Lock Screen and shows measurements in your units (see Settings). It updates about once a minute and at once on events; landing, a lost signal or pausing the watch ends it, and it stays on the Lock Screen for 15 minutes. Each watch has Live Activity on iPhone (on by default) in its Notifications card; it applies to recipients with mobile push. Track live on an aircraft in the app starts one yourself. There's one per aircraft: Track live keeps the one an aircraft already has, and an aircraft that drops out of coverage low and comes back keeps its own. If the app hasn't run since an activity started, the activity catches up when you open the app. Needs iOS 17.2 or later for activities started at takeoff, and Live Activities allowed for the app in Settings. When you also get the takeoff or event by push, the activity updates silently so your phone doesn't alert twice.

Settings

Settings sets the units for speeds (kt, km/h or mph), altitudes (ft or m) and distances (nm, km or mi) on the map, in aircraft details and in Live Activities. The org default is set by org owners and admins; anyone can choose their own units for any of the three, which apply in every org. Without a setting, Maps uses knots, feet and nautical miles. Through the API: GET and PUT /v1/orgs/:orgId/maps/settings (the org's) and PUT …/maps/settings/me (your own).

API and MCP

Everything here is in the API under /v1/orgs/:orgId/maps, and your own location under /v1/me/maps/location (see Maps and flight watches). AI clients get aircraft_find ("where is VH-ABC?"), aircraft_track, flight_watches_list, flight_watch_events, flight_logs_list, flight_log_get, maps_locations_list and my_location_status (never coordinates) with maps:read, and flight_watch_create (with lifetime, pinning, logging, classes, presets and near), circling_alert_create, maps_location_create, maps_location_update, maps_location_delete, my_location_delete, flight_watch_pause and flight_watch_restart with maps:write (see MCP tools). Aircraft presets are platform data (/v1/platform/aircraft-presets).

Emergency incidents are GET …/maps/incidents (filters bbox, hazards, minLevel, near, areas=0; ETag) and GET …/maps/incidents/:incidentId (with its history); watch zones are …/maps/zones (list, create, change, pause, resume, test, events, delete) and …/maps/zones/config. AI clients get incidents_list, incident_get, watch_zones_list and watch_zone_events with maps:read, and watch_zone_create, watch_zone_update, watch_zone_pause and watch_zone_delete with maps:write. The feeds are platform data (/v1/platform/incident-sources, Admin → Flights → Emergency Feeds).