Truckers called them Smokey. We just kept the name.
SmokySignal tells motorcyclists, drivers, and curious locals — in one glance — whether the bird is up, where it is, and what it’s watching. Coverage: Washington state — every WSP, county sheriff, and federal agency airframe we can confirm is broadcasting.
The campaign hat
WSP troopers wear a flat-brimmed, high-crowned campaign hat — the same silhouette as Smokey Bear. The hat earned them the nickname long before any aircraft were involved.
CB-radio slang
In the 1970s, peak CB era, truckers coined a private vocabulary for warning each other about speed traps. Because of the hat, troopers became Smokey on the airwaves. Smokey and the Bandit (1977) cemented it in pop culture.
The aviation callsign
WSP Aviation embraced the nickname. Their fleet — Cessnas with FLIR cameras for clocking speeders from the sky — operates under the official callsign “Smokey,” numbered Smokey 1, Smokey 4, etc.
SmokySignal
Smokey (the bear, the trooper, the plane) plus smoke signal (the original beacon-warning system) plus signal (radio, transmission, alert). The product is the modern smoke signal — a quiet, glanceable warning that the bird is watching.
We listen, we don’t talk.
SmokySignal pulls public aircraft signals and renders them. Nothing about you, your speed, or your phone leaves your device on its way to anyone — including WSP. Full data flow on /legal.
Drop the badge on your blog.
Live SMOKEY UP / ALL CLEAR badge. SVG, no JS, edge-cached for ~30 seconds. Works in any HTML.
<a href="https://smokysignal.app"> <img src="https://smokysignal.app/api/badge.svg" alt="SmokySignal status"> </a>
Live preview: 
Aircraft positions are pulled from the public ADS-B network. Primary feed: adsb.fi. Fallback: OpenSky Network. Both are anonymous, free, and require attribution — provided here and in the home footer. We cache snapshots for 10 seconds so a hundred riders watching the page generate one upstream call.
These are the tails this app currently watches. The list comes from public ADS-B sightings cross-referenced with state and county fleet records. Tap any tail to see its detail page.