Bandit: Plane Spotter

In air-intercept brevity, a bandit is an aircraft that has been positively identified. That is the whole game.

Point your phone at a real aircraft, take the shot, and get paid for what you caught.

Bandit turns plane spotting into a collection game played against the actual sky. It reads live ADS-B broadcasts from the traffic around you, works out which aircraft your camera is genuinely pointing at, and checks that you really photographed it. Name the airframe, and the payout scales with how hard that one was to find.

SPOT
A radar dial shows the aircraft above you on a satellite map, moving in real time. Line one up in the viewfinder and a lock-on box tells you exactly what you are aimed at — callsign, altitude, range. Pinch to zoom until it fills the frame, fire, and the app identifies it from its broadcast ID: type, tail number, operator.

EARN
Rarity is not about size. It is about how hard an aircraft is to stand under and photograph. The A320 you see every day sits near the bottom. A Saab 340, a 737 Classic, an offshore S-92 — those pay, because few are left and they fly to places nobody photographs. Roughly one spot in twelve comes in as a bonus worth two and a half times the usual.

The same airframe only pays once every five hours. A parked plane is not an income stream. Go and find another one.

COLLECT
Every qualifying sighting earns its own card in your current prestige cycle. The collectible front shows your photograph, aircraft identity, registration, operator, rarity, condition, date, place and aircraft figures. Open a card for its full photograph and capture history. Merge three matching Standard cards into Excellent, or three Excellent cards into Mint. Unseen catalog aircraft remain silhouettes in the Binder until you find them.

Complete six spotting achievements, reach level 50 and prestige to archive a finished Binder and begin a new collection. Your photographs, cash, permanent shop purchases and lifetime progress stay with you.

LOGBOOK
Not everything is a score. Every photograph is also filed in a logbook that keeps no points at all: the flight it was on and where it had come from, a note you can write on it, and the day and place you took it. Moments turn up on their own when something is worth noticing — an aircraft caught in the last of the light, three of them inside ten minutes, the first of a type you have never logged. Start a session when you head out, and get a recap of the afternoon at the end of it. No ranking, no streak to protect, nothing to grind.

CURIOSITY
Every aircraft carries a page of its own: when the type entered service, what it seats, how far it goes, and one thing about it worth knowing. Alongside it, your own record — how many you have seen, and whether there is a pattern in when and where you see them.

ALERTS
Bandit can watch the sky near where you last were and tell you when something is worth walking outside for: a military aircraft, rare metal, or a type you have never photographed. At most one notification an hour, ever. It never asks for background location — it checks over the last place you had the app open, and forgets a position more than six hours old.

BOOSTERS
Spend earned in-game cash on timed cash, XP, rarity, alert range and card merge boosters. Different effects can run together, and extra copies extend the timer. Save them for a day you know you are heading somewhere busy.

WHAT YOU NEED
A camera, a GPS fix and a sky. Aircraft are identified from public ADS-B broadcasts, so an aircraft has to be transmitting to be spottable — nearly all airliners and a great many light aircraft are, though coverage varies by region.

Create an optional account to back up cards, scores and logbook progress, compete in global rankings and join squads. Full photos stay on the phone where you took them and are not backed up; restored sightings show placeholders.