I was asked to come up with a 3D display of the airspace around an aircraft for the pilot to use and which could replace the 2D displays used then. People were impressed, but decided it was impractical for a variety of reasons. You can't really tell where the aircraft are relative to each other and the ground without rotating the display (which means the pilot loses their orientation), and there are no altitude indicators and it's difficult to tell where each aircraft is relative to the others. (Which is why I added the vertical lines and ground tracks.) Also things get visually messy when several aircraft are close together, even if you use different colors (which doesn't work for the colorblind). For example, could you use this display to tell if a collision is imminent near ground level in proximity to an airport? The display does give you a high level sense of what is going on in the airspace; it may not have enough details to be of practical use to pilots and air traffic controllers. I'd suggest consulting with them to get feedback. Maybe this would be practical as a VR display? How did they solve this in the F-35 helmet display?
had it bookmarked since the last share, but had noted the world-tiles would regularly not load, seems okay (and with colors?) now,
but maybe that could need some low-detail fallback when arcgisonline servers are busting? - some 16k image to fill all the black void?
also "copy this view" does nothing (neither location nor any settings, gives just the bare link)
I noticed one minor area for potential improvement: when I look at the ATL area right now, it looks like aircraft are clipping through the ground at takeoff and landing.
I'm guessing this is because you're taking the pressure altitude which is derived from aircraft transponder data, and incorrectly interpreting it as altitude above sea level, without correcting for local air pressure variations. Right now, local barometric pressure in Atlanta is about 1028 mbar, which means pressure altitude is about 450 feet lower than true MSL altitude.
(Pilots need to know their altitude relative to sea level and the ground, so they have to manually adjust their altimeters to correct for pressure variations, based on the latest local weather conditions. For ATC, it's more critical to know aircraft's altitudes relative to each other. So transponders report the pressure altitude without correction, to guarantee that inconsistent pressure corrections can't cause errors.)
I am not a developer at all (electrician, retired, live in a flightpath), but I'm pretty sure you can build a healthy retirement with your absolutely breathtaking solo project.
At the same time, I'm not sure how you monetize such an easily "stealable" idea. My hunch is that you'll see other flight trackers debut your perspective as one of many layers within their own trackers (this is where you come in, as consultant?).
Absolutely killer would be integrating with https://www.liveatc.net/ or other live ATC stream. Drop down to choose ground, tower, approach/departure, center, etc.
This is quite cool, seeing taking off planes appearing and rising is cool.
Some comments:
- Is the Up axis correctly scaled? The ascent rate of planes taking off seems very steep
- Planes landing seems to get "stuck" at the beginning of a lane at about 600 feet (tracking/radar cutoff?), maybe a fix the that slightly adjusts it to ground in a landed state if a plane "stops" or disappears from the data tracking.
It's amusing that changing the altitude scale doesn't reset the "trails" -- when I dragged it around quickly (on mobile) it left vertical streaks behind all the in-flight planes
Super cool app, saw someone posting about this on insta the other day. Do you have any info about how you've gathered and united all the different kinds of data you needed to build this? I've been working on a bunch of GIS/mapping stuff recently and I would love to hear more about other people's approaches to this sort of thing.
Flash is just “We don’t like to pay developers. We prefer you to pay more for memory. And your processor. And by the why, we don’t care about your security.”
Ironically memory prices are skyrocketing right now. Even the best known Electron application (Signal) is eating memory like it is free. Similiar native applications integrate much better and use a fraction of memory (e.g. Fractal).
PS: If autonomous locally usage doesn’t make sense a mere web-app is good way. At least it is then a single tab in the web-browser and most platforms are covered (if you don’t target Chrome exclusively…). In this case possible step? At least not 500 MB wasted.
I think the common opinion is that unless you are really careful, it becomes quite a big executable eating a huge amount of ram even for low functionality and often slow.
There are very good electron apps, but the engineering to make them small and fast is quite important.
I use Flightaware for detailed information about specific flights. They have tons of information about the history of the flight, past delays, etc. I use it to track specific incoming flights when I have to pick up someone from the airport. I keep an eye on it when I'm waiting to fly, and I also use it to see progress of the flight while I'm in the air if the airline doesn't provide that in a seat-back screen.
While your site is pretty cool, it's more of a neat thing to look at than it is a useful tool like Flightaware. That said, I bookmarked it and will visit it often (probably) as I live near an airport and can see planes in the distance. Also, I second the request for higher-resolution map tiles.
(1) you should default to a busy airport, eg. Atlanta, which is the busiest in the world. They have an order of magnitude more flights landing and departing. It seems random, but I keep getting New Orleans which is 10-20x less busy than Atlanta. ATL, SFO, LAX, ... That said, the topographically diverse places like Anchorage are nice too, and the height maps on the textures are fantastic.
(2) Higher resolution satellite titles would be awesome. I have a high density flight path directly overhead and I'd love to see where I live on the map and know which way to look in real time, but the textures are about 10x too grainy to make out my street / neighborhood. Maybe you can download some high resolution tiles for free that won't be a big performance hit?
It looks completely accurate. I could see the medivac helicopters taking off, and it matched 1:1.
I missed a biplane flying over the city. And some other low-flying planes circling mysteriously.
If I had a telephoto lens and a way to alert myself of large planes flying low (happens frequently), C-130s, F-22s, etc. I think I'd waste way too much time.
Note from the developer:
I’m so glad that many of you like this app. I’m a solo dev, actively building between my 9-5 and raising a 9mo.
Please follow along on X https://x.com/benlimner, or join the mailing list for updates/suggestions!
Cool, I tried something similar 30 years ago working for a military contractor:
http://zoom.interoscitor.com/PetersonEnterprises/Consulting/...
I was asked to come up with a 3D display of the airspace around an aircraft for the pilot to use and which could replace the 2D displays used then. People were impressed, but decided it was impractical for a variety of reasons. You can't really tell where the aircraft are relative to each other and the ground without rotating the display (which means the pilot loses their orientation), and there are no altitude indicators and it's difficult to tell where each aircraft is relative to the others. (Which is why I added the vertical lines and ground tracks.) Also things get visually messy when several aircraft are close together, even if you use different colors (which doesn't work for the colorblind). For example, could you use this display to tell if a collision is imminent near ground level in proximity to an airport? The display does give you a high level sense of what is going on in the airspace; it may not have enough details to be of practical use to pilots and air traffic controllers. I'd suggest consulting with them to get feedback. Maybe this would be practical as a VR display? How did they solve this in the F-35 helmet display?
had it bookmarked since the last share, but had noted the world-tiles would regularly not load, seems okay (and with colors?) now, but maybe that could need some low-detail fallback when arcgisonline servers are busting? - some 16k image to fill all the black void?
also "copy this view" does nothing (neither location nor any settings, gives just the bare link)
Cool project.
I noticed one minor area for potential improvement: when I look at the ATL area right now, it looks like aircraft are clipping through the ground at takeoff and landing.
I'm guessing this is because you're taking the pressure altitude which is derived from aircraft transponder data, and incorrectly interpreting it as altitude above sea level, without correcting for local air pressure variations. Right now, local barometric pressure in Atlanta is about 1028 mbar, which means pressure altitude is about 450 feet lower than true MSL altitude.
(Pilots need to know their altitude relative to sea level and the ground, so they have to manually adjust their altimeters to correct for pressure variations, based on the latest local weather conditions. For ATC, it's more critical to know aircraft's altitudes relative to each other. So transponders report the pressure altitude without correction, to guarantee that inconsistent pressure corrections can't cause errors.)
I am not a developer at all (electrician, retired, live in a flightpath), but I'm pretty sure you can build a healthy retirement with your absolutely breathtaking solo project.
At the same time, I'm not sure how you monetize such an easily "stealable" idea. My hunch is that you'll see other flight trackers debut your perspective as one of many layers within their own trackers (this is where you come in, as consultant?).
Godspeed, ace.
Really nice!
Absolutely killer would be integrating with https://www.liveatc.net/ or other live ATC stream. Drop down to choose ground, tower, approach/departure, center, etc.
I'll start in another tab for now.
Completely agree. I think the concept has legs enough to actually start paying for some of these more expensive data providers.
This is quite cool, seeing taking off planes appearing and rising is cool.
Some comments: - Is the Up axis correctly scaled? The ascent rate of planes taking off seems very steep - Planes landing seems to get "stuck" at the beginning of a lane at about 600 feet (tracking/radar cutoff?), maybe a fix the that slightly adjusts it to ground in a landed state if a plane "stops" or disappears from the data tracking.
Down at the bottom of the menu there's an altitude scale slider. It defaults to 1.2, changing it to 1.0 makes the trails look better.
It's amusing that changing the altitude scale doesn't reset the "trails" -- when I dragged it around quickly (on mobile) it left vertical streaks behind all the in-flight planes
I’ll fix that.
This is fabulous. I wonder if something like this with 3D vision could make air traffic control much safer?
Super cool app, saw someone posting about this on insta the other day. Do you have any info about how you've gathered and united all the different kinds of data you needed to build this? I've been working on a bunch of GIS/mapping stuff recently and I would love to hear more about other people's approaches to this sort of thing.
Planes flying w/ multiple transponders [1]?
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Screenshot-2025-11-29-at-8.2...
They’re likely planes that are on the ground with transponders on. You can toggle off the “show planes on ground” to hide the mess.
I love this, and would pay for native or electron app on Mac. Like Google Earth for global airspace.
Working on it!
Looking forward to it! Anywhere to donate or otherwise contribute financially towards this project?
Please. No Electron!
Why not?
https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/
Please use native toolkits. At least Gtk or Qt :)
Flash is just “We don’t like to pay developers. We prefer you to pay more for memory. And your processor. And by the why, we don’t care about your security.”
Ironically memory prices are skyrocketing right now. Even the best known Electron application (Signal) is eating memory like it is free. Similiar native applications integrate much better and use a fraction of memory (e.g. Fractal).
PS: If autonomous locally usage doesn’t make sense a mere web-app is good way. At least it is then a single tab in the web-browser and most platforms are covered (if you don’t target Chrome exclusively…). In this case possible step? At least not 500 MB wasted.
I think the common opinion is that unless you are really careful, it becomes quite a big executable eating a huge amount of ram even for low functionality and often slow.
There are very good electron apps, but the engineering to make them small and fast is quite important.
As an old-timer who learned programming with punched cards, this visualization blows my mind. I want to turn it into my desktop screen saver.
A second monitor running this in surf mode might be a close second
this is really cool! can you make it interpolate and smoothly animate based on velocity and trajectory?
As a bit of a Flight Aware addict, well done.
Curious, what would make you default to this tool over FA?
I use Flightaware for detailed information about specific flights. They have tons of information about the history of the flight, past delays, etc. I use it to track specific incoming flights when I have to pick up someone from the airport. I keep an eye on it when I'm waiting to fly, and I also use it to see progress of the flight while I'm in the air if the airline doesn't provide that in a seat-back screen.
While your site is pretty cool, it's more of a neat thing to look at than it is a useful tool like Flightaware. That said, I bookmarked it and will visit it often (probably) as I live near an airport and can see planes in the distance. Also, I second the request for higher-resolution map tiles.
Thanks for the feedback!
Wow, great idea well executed, congrats
Ty
Pretty cool! I made something similar a while ago, and used cesium primarily.
This is amazingly cool
This is really freaking cool.
Two asks -
(1) you should default to a busy airport, eg. Atlanta, which is the busiest in the world. They have an order of magnitude more flights landing and departing. It seems random, but I keep getting New Orleans which is 10-20x less busy than Atlanta. ATL, SFO, LAX, ... That said, the topographically diverse places like Anchorage are nice too, and the height maps on the textures are fantastic.
(2) Higher resolution satellite titles would be awesome. I have a high density flight path directly overhead and I'd love to see where I live on the map and know which way to look in real time, but the textures are about 10x too grainy to make out my street / neighborhood. Maybe you can download some high resolution tiles for free that won't be a big performance hit?
I’m actively looking for a better map tile provider here.
You’re getting New Orleans because it’s truly selecting from ~20 random US airports.
Stoked that you like the app!
interesting, seems to be random. I've gotten Portland which was also not too busy but nevertheless enough to understand the beauty of it.
It’s a random assortment of ~20 US cities. I’m happy to add another one into the mix if you’d like.
If there’s an airport you want to default to, search for it and save the URL
This thing is dangerous. It's going to nerd snipe me into a new hobby.
https://imgur.com/a/264P9Q4
It looks completely accurate. I could see the medivac helicopters taking off, and it matched 1:1.
I missed a biplane flying over the city. And some other low-flying planes circling mysteriously.
If I had a telephoto lens and a way to alert myself of large planes flying low (happens frequently), C-130s, F-22s, etc. I think I'd waste way too much time.
I need to avoid looking into this more.
No, lean in! Haha
I’m looking into adding better data providers so there are fewer missing planes.