Overhead Long Beach

Quieter skies, signed by you.

Overhead is a free, neighborhood-built app for residents who live under the Long Beach Airport flight path. One tap captures an overhead plane, the time, your location, your altitude estimate, and the actual decibel level of the noise. Then — when you're ready — Overhead opens your own Mail app with a pre-filled report addressed to the right people. You review it. You hit Send. The complaint goes out from your account, in your name, as constituent correspondence.

That last part matters. In January 2026, a court tossed out a neighborhood lawsuit demanding stricter enforcement of LGB's noise ordinance. The judge ruled the city only has to act on noise it can individually prove. One resident, one email, one signed concern is exactly that. Anything an app sent on your behalf would land as "just an app" and get filtered out — yours can't.

WHO THIS IS FOR
California Heights, Bixby Knolls, Los Cerritos, and the rest of the neighborhoods that hear flight schools doing touch-and-go loops over their backyards from 6:30 AM to 11:45 PM. If that's you, this app was built for you.

WHAT YOU GET
• Tap to capture: photo or up to 8 seconds of video
• Live decibel meter measures the actual noise level on capture
• ADS-B + registry lookup pulls the aircraft's tail number, type, and owner/operator when available
• Time, location, altitude, and ordinance status are recorded automatically
• One-tap dispatch: opens your Mail app with the report pre-addressed
• Real map of every report you've sent, color-coded by ordinance status
• Compile any month into a single PDF for AAC public comment
• Works offline — reports queue locally and send when you're back online

PRIVACY THAT'S ACTUALLY PRIVATE
Overhead has no visible account, no ads, and no analytics SDKs. Your full reports, photos, videos, decibel readings, coordinates, and notes live on your phone unless you choose to send a report through Mail. The app also sends a tiny anonymous tally row to our Supabase backend so the public observatory can count neighborhood activity. No tracking, no advertising IDs, no third-party analytics.

NOT AFFILIATED with the City of Long Beach, Long Beach Airport, the FAA, or any government body. Overhead is an independent civic-tech project built by neighbors who got tired of waiting.