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?
You might find interesting how space games have tackled this issue. Most share the same design for a radar display that shows targets around you in all dimensions using vertical lines to offset the markers above or below. Check out a video of Elite Dangerous combat to see it in action. It seems conceptually very similar to what you came up with.
You faced all of the same usability problems. Until there is a true 3D display I don’t think this will be super useful for true traffic awareness. The cockpit is just too chaotic.
It’s very interesting to see your graphic. Was this supposed to be displayed on a cockpit TV?
Yes, it was supposed to be an alternative graphic for a cockpit radar display in a jet fighter. The goal for any such display is to convey maximum information at a glance. I got feedback from a fighter pilot who said he wouldn't use it. Most people don't think in 3D, they think in 2D. Pilots have to think in 3D to some extent, but in a battle a fighter pilot wants to know what they immediately need to pay attention to, which is usually something heading directly at them (another jet or missile) and they mostly want to know the direction it is coming from, not so much what its altitude is. I made the path histories fade out so they didn't get too long and clutter the screen. The vertical bars were calibrated to indicate a specific distance so they also gave an idea of velocity. It would be possible to add/remove things from the display based on some automatic assessments of priority (i.e., remove everything not headed at the pilot, though having things appear and disappear can be confusing also). The aircraft icons were actual wireframe models representing the type of the aircraft, but had to be oversize to see them, which added some confusion also. The pilot found a fixed size icon with a few numbers next to it and highlighting for approaching/receding much more useful. Took me a long time to digitize them with just a ruler. While such a display may not have a technical use, it might be useful in advertising, showing travelers at an airport what is going on around the airport at the moment for example.
Not everyone sees color exactly the same way, for example some people can see a little into the IR and UV. While the pilots may not be colorblind, the people who repair the displays might be. Situations can also make pilots colorblind, like strong glare coming through a window. It's better to have an unambiguous display that is easy to interpret rather than to rely on something that can be subjective like color. People can only reliably identify a few distinct colors, so if you have 300 kinds of planes and missiles to identify using shades of red and purple doesn't work so well. An ID number next to an icon can handle thousands of kinds of entities. People can tell color #F0479E is different then #F04750 when comparing them side by side, but they probably can't tell you what the exact name of each shade is, and at a glance they might think they are both the same color. So it's not so much colorblindness as it is the limits of human perception. What I call Hunter Green and English Racing Green might look like the same color to you.
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.)
No this is a known issue, there is some mitigation for it right now, but I haven’t chased down all of the edge cases.
There are some places on the map where the terrain texture isn’t great, or is below the elevation of the centered airport, and the planes will breach the mesh. There’s a setting in there where you can manually tweak the ‘ground elevation’ if it gets annoying to you.
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?).
At a minimum: If your resumé previously lacked page 2, it no longer does.
I'd recon your page 3 has already begun, too... as you digest all these intentional comments, over the next few months: don't ever lose your glee of hackiness.
Luck, given — but you've already done all the work!
Another bug: when you adjust altitude scale, it doesn't rescale the existing trails, it simply moves the planes up and down leaving stairsteps in their paths.
Suggestion - make it default to an airport that is currently in daytime. Clicked on it this morning EU time and Boston was obviously dead to the point of the site seeming empty/broken
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)
without an airport near "my current location" is my goto.
is there a direct link for this? (otherwise i may hack together some userscript that clicks that button for me...)
"my assumption" would have been some x/y/angle/zoom params on the url, maybe even with some of the settings encoded in... (autorotate, render-radius or terrain height would be first to come to mind)
my "not getting any tiles" must have been 2 or 3 days ago - and from the last time i had to mess with tiles i do remember that to be fairly ugly in regards to performance/scaling so i feel you ;)
also addon after trying the "direct link to an airport":
- this still loads at the random-US-airport first. with some tweaking there is likely an entire tilefetch you can save^
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.
It looks very nice. It's a nifty project. However, as the particular kind of weirdo who has a bookmark to https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ on his phone's desktop and checks it multiple times daily, I will point out that this UI doesn't add much that the color-coded plane icons on ADS-Bx don't already do, and it is more difficult to quickly visually glean information from.
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
(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.
Private pilot here.
This is an awesome proyect.
I cant make air spaces work, but if you manage to render them properly with TMA, CTR, AWY and other stuff, this would be incredibly useful for students.
Can you give the iata codes for these? I can only find TMA in ForeFlight, and it looks like it’s uncontrolled airspace so there wouldn’t be anything represented in my app
Very nice. My only feedback is that on a 2017 iMac (Radeon Pro 580), while rotating around, there is a brief hiccup every 1 second. Probably transferring data to the GPU periodically, but something is blocking rendering. Reproducible on Safari and Firefox.
Not reproducible on Windows Edge or Firefox, on a RX 5700, where it's consistently smooth.
Buttery smooth on mobile (iPhone 14), but the slider thumbs have a vertical anlignment issue (consider using a component library that has solved all the niggles rather than rolling your own).
Also, you might consider setting the default airport according to time of day – Memphis is dead rn, whereas Heathrow is super busy and fun to watch…
Buttery smooth on mobile (iPhone 14), but the slider thumbs have a vertical anlignment issue (consider using a component library that has solved all the niggles rather than rolling your own).
Also, you might consider setting the default airport according to time of day – Memphis is dead RN, whereas Heathrow is super busy and fun to watch…
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.
Honestly I just smooshed a lot of different public sources of data together. There was a lot of fine tuning, and retracing my steps. No real magic. But happy to answer some questions.
Can you talk a bit about how you're getting the live position data for the planes, I'd love to play around with that stream myself. I do plotter art and I want to make some plotter drawings of flightpaths.
Only enhancement I can think of would be the option of using the FAA published (and free) sectional maps instead of the satellite view. In combination with the 3d airspace you did, would be amazing!
I'm only seeing a circle that is lit up? Am I supposed to see the whole globe or is this a glitch on my system? I'm on a M1 Macbook Pro, Sonoma w/ Chrome.
Pinch zoom is the preferred method, it just needs to zoom at a usable (much faster) pace.
I have no idea what input events zooming generates. Perhaps an option in the URL could be used to turn on a log of input events that people can copy/paste and submit back to you, so you can get a sense of what events are coming from various devices and input methods without having to find devices to try them all yourself.
Plenty of map sites have spent years broken on Macs, not handling smooth pinch-zoom or Magic Mouse smooth scroll wheel events. A slight 3mm movement of a finger going from fully zoomed in street view to fully zoomed out planet view. I'm assuming every micro-movement event is treated as a Windows scroll wheel event where you expect to move a decent chunk on each event.
However you're treating zoom inputs, you've got the opposite effect. A full zoom motion barely does anything.
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.
I’ve tried it in 2d to pretty good success. It’s a bit low on my list of items to add, partially because I have a hunch that calculating and projecting thousands of vectors is going to cost more compute than simply accepting coordinates and drawing lines.
Modern CPUs do billions of floating point operations per second. Calculating and projecting thousands of vectors is pocket change. On a GPU it’s even more laughably small.
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.
This website is really cool; I love its clean and clear information display. The expanded panel on the side has a lot of configuration options, but I don't quite understand most of it.
I also followed you on Twitter; my name is winterx.
Bro, you could try creating a 3D version of the Earth using AI and Three.js. You'll gain 10 times more attention online.
I’ll have to experiment with a full 3-D globe. The only problem I foresee is the lag associated with rendering the thousands of global flights all at once.
Ask ChatGPT to generate product or business names for you. A lot of them contain the word “loom”. I know someone who recently vibe coded a thing and had an AI name it and it also has “loom” in it.
I’m not suggesting that that’s what happened with this project. I have no idea how much AI they used for any of it. But “loom” seems to appear in a lot of ChatGPT generated product names lately.
I’ll have to look into that when renaming this. I didn’t do any product research before, and it looks like there are bike saddles, power generators, and mattresses all with the same name .
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?
You might find interesting how space games have tackled this issue. Most share the same design for a radar display that shows targets around you in all dimensions using vertical lines to offset the markers above or below. Check out a video of Elite Dangerous combat to see it in action. It seems conceptually very similar to what you came up with.
Thank you both for sharing your gaming and IRL experiences. It's neat to see how problems overlap, in and out of reality.
Form and function (or something).
Homeworld (1 and 2) also had a great 3D interface for viewing and controlling ships.
This is the coolest thing I’ve seen this week.
You faced all of the same usability problems. Until there is a true 3D display I don’t think this will be super useful for true traffic awareness. The cockpit is just too chaotic.
It’s very interesting to see your graphic. Was this supposed to be displayed on a cockpit TV?
Yes, it was supposed to be an alternative graphic for a cockpit radar display in a jet fighter. The goal for any such display is to convey maximum information at a glance. I got feedback from a fighter pilot who said he wouldn't use it. Most people don't think in 3D, they think in 2D. Pilots have to think in 3D to some extent, but in a battle a fighter pilot wants to know what they immediately need to pay attention to, which is usually something heading directly at them (another jet or missile) and they mostly want to know the direction it is coming from, not so much what its altitude is. I made the path histories fade out so they didn't get too long and clutter the screen. The vertical bars were calibrated to indicate a specific distance so they also gave an idea of velocity. It would be possible to add/remove things from the display based on some automatic assessments of priority (i.e., remove everything not headed at the pilot, though having things appear and disappear can be confusing also). The aircraft icons were actual wireframe models representing the type of the aircraft, but had to be oversize to see them, which added some confusion also. The pilot found a fixed size icon with a few numbers next to it and highlighting for approaching/receding much more useful. Took me a long time to digitize them with just a ruler. While such a display may not have a technical use, it might be useful in advertising, showing travelers at an airport what is going on around the airport at the moment for example.
> which doesn't work for the colorblind
Does the military have colorblind pilots?
Not everyone sees color exactly the same way, for example some people can see a little into the IR and UV. While the pilots may not be colorblind, the people who repair the displays might be. Situations can also make pilots colorblind, like strong glare coming through a window. It's better to have an unambiguous display that is easy to interpret rather than to rely on something that can be subjective like color. People can only reliably identify a few distinct colors, so if you have 300 kinds of planes and missiles to identify using shades of red and purple doesn't work so well. An ID number next to an icon can handle thousands of kinds of entities. People can tell color #F0479E is different then #F04750 when comparing them side by side, but they probably can't tell you what the exact name of each shade is, and at a glance they might think they are both the same color. So it's not so much colorblindness as it is the limits of human perception. What I call Hunter Green and English Racing Green might look like the same color to you.
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.)
No this is a known issue, there is some mitigation for it right now, but I haven’t chased down all of the edge cases.
There are some places on the map where the terrain texture isn’t great, or is below the elevation of the centered airport, and the planes will breach the mesh. There’s a setting in there where you can manually tweak the ‘ground elevation’ if it gets annoying to you.
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.
Give me some of the luck you’re spreading, and brother I might have a chance to make a dollar or two.
But if nothing comes of it, I’ve had a ball making it, and chatting with the community.
At a minimum: If your resumé previously lacked page 2, it no longer does.
I'd recon your page 3 has already begun, too... as you digest all these intentional comments, over the next few months: don't ever lose your glee of hackiness.
Luck, given — but you've already done all the work!
I got one random plane that was black instead of color-coded by altitude. Bug?
https://imgur.com/a/YLxRaQ6
Another bug: when you adjust altitude scale, it doesn't rescale the existing trails, it simply moves the planes up and down leaving stairsteps in their paths.
Thanks for the note. I’m actively chasing down both of these.
The scale change one will be easy to sort out. The black one is a little harder, sometimes the adsb data comes in corrupted.
One more suggestion: if the camera is below the ground, hide the ground texture.
For interesting flights to visualize in 3D, try to get data from one of the Zero-G planes on their parabolic flights. F-HNOV is the European one.
I’ll try!
Also watching the high altitude balloons pop and fall straight through traffic is awesome
Oh and you should check out the fighter jet training around San Antonio
Suggestion - make it default to an airport that is currently in daytime. Clicked on it this morning EU time and Boston was obviously dead to the point of the site seeming empty/broken
Sounds like a fun challenge
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)
Copy this view really only works when you are following a plane or are at an airport you searched for. If that doesn’t work, ping me.
I think the map tiles are a symptom of the overnight success of the app. I might have to find a new map provider if they permanently limited my IP
without an airport near "my current location" is my goto. is there a direct link for this? (otherwise i may hack together some userscript that clicks that button for me...)
"my assumption" would have been some x/y/angle/zoom params on the url, maybe even with some of the settings encoded in... (autorotate, render-radius or terrain height would be first to come to mind)
my "not getting any tiles" must have been 2 or 3 days ago - and from the last time i had to mess with tiles i do remember that to be fairly ugly in regards to performance/scaling so i feel you ;)
also addon after trying the "direct link to an airport": - this still loads at the random-US-airport first. with some tweaking there is likely an entire tilefetch you can save^
thx!
I’ll work on adding a ‘near me’ direct link. I totally missed that feature so thanks for mentioning it.
Thanks for also pointing out the direct link to airport bug.
I’m planning on furthering the deep link capabilities so you can save other settings.
The premium that I’m planning will have more robust ability to save settings presets.
Done! Use ?airport=nearme
What data source are you using? AeroAPI?
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.
It looks very nice. It's a nifty project. However, as the particular kind of weirdo who has a bookmark to https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ on his phone's desktop and checks it multiple times daily, I will point out that this UI doesn't add much that the color-coded plane icons on ADS-Bx don't already do, and it is more difficult to quickly visually glean information from.
Maybe this will be something you look at to review interesting flights, or near misses?
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
Fixed
I’ll fix that.
I fixed the altitude scale issue.
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?
EWR is fascinating to look at because there are three major airports in one area with all sorts of approach and departure angles.
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!
> I’m actively looking for a better map tile provider here.
What about OSM Carto?[0] It's free and open-source.
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap_Carto
I’ve been using them through their free api, and I got rate limited. So I’ll maybe self-host, or find a paid provider with better tiles
interesting, seems to be random. I've gotten Portland which was also not too busy but nevertheless enough to understand the beauty of it.
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.
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
I’m unable to access the website directly from Romania (I tried different connections). Is there any reason why this region is blocked in CloudFlare?
Private pilot here. This is an awesome proyect. I cant make air spaces work, but if you manage to render them properly with TMA, CTR, AWY and other stuff, this would be incredibly useful for students.
Can you give the iata codes for these? I can only find TMA in ForeFlight, and it looks like it’s uncontrolled airspace so there wouldn’t be anything represented in my app
There’s a bug where airspace doesn’t like to load after searching for an airport. I’m working on that.
Try loading airspace on one of the default random airports & let me know if it still doesn’t work for you
Very nice. My only feedback is that on a 2017 iMac (Radeon Pro 580), while rotating around, there is a brief hiccup every 1 second. Probably transferring data to the GPU periodically, but something is blocking rendering. Reproducible on Safari and Firefox.
Not reproducible on Windows Edge or Firefox, on a RX 5700, where it's consistently smooth.
Thanks I still have a lot of optimization to do before this is smooth across the board.
It’s definitely a chrome-first app at this point.
Very cool!
Buttery smooth on mobile (iPhone 14), but the slider thumbs have a vertical anlignment issue (consider using a component library that has solved all the niggles rather than rolling your own).
Also, you might consider setting the default airport according to time of day – Memphis is dead rn, whereas Heathrow is super busy and fun to watch…
Also, lots be the name!
Very cool!
Buttery smooth on mobile (iPhone 14), but the slider thumbs have a vertical anlignment issue (consider using a component library that has solved all the niggles rather than rolling your own).
Also, you might consider setting the default airport according to time of day – Memphis is dead RN, whereas Heathrow is super busy and fun to watch…
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
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.
I saw his post too. The view count is crazy!
Honestly I just smooshed a lot of different public sources of data together. There was a lot of fine tuning, and retracing my steps. No real magic. But happy to answer some questions.
Can you talk a bit about how you're getting the live position data for the planes, I'd love to play around with that stream myself. I do plotter art and I want to make some plotter drawings of flightpaths.
https://www.adsbexchange.com/
This is really cool!
Only enhancement I can think of would be the option of using the FAA published (and free) sectional maps instead of the satellite view. In combination with the 3d airspace you did, would be amazing!
Yeah that is a good move. I’ll add this to the short list
This is fabulous. I wonder if something like this with 3D vision could make air traffic control much safer?
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'm only seeing a circle that is lit up? Am I supposed to see the whole globe or is this a glitch on my system? I'm on a M1 Macbook Pro, Sonoma w/ Chrome.
No glitch. It’s purposefully limited upon initial load. Adjust the search radius to increase your view range
I tried Firefox Android, it instantly loaded a 3D view of a 2D map projection with glowing planes at an airport
This is pretty amazing. It would be pretty cool if clicking on plane shows additional info of plan like destination
There is some info you can get if you click the plane, then click the call sign
It just sits at "Initializing 3D Space". I don't get anything else.
Neat project.
Minor usability note, zooming by pinch on a MacBook trackpad is painfully slow.
Thanks for the note. I hear you on the zoom pain. What would be your preferred means of zooming?
Pinch zoom is the preferred method, it just needs to zoom at a usable (much faster) pace.
I have no idea what input events zooming generates. Perhaps an option in the URL could be used to turn on a log of input events that people can copy/paste and submit back to you, so you can get a sense of what events are coming from various devices and input methods without having to find devices to try them all yourself.
Plenty of map sites have spent years broken on Macs, not handling smooth pinch-zoom or Magic Mouse smooth scroll wheel events. A slight 3mm movement of a finger going from fully zoomed in street view to fully zoomed out planet view. I'm assuming every micro-movement event is treated as a Windows scroll wheel event where you expect to move a decent chunk on each event.
However you're treating zoom inputs, you've got the opposite effect. A full zoom motion barely does anything.
Just noticed you also support scroll to zoom, and it works at a decent speed.
I’m glad you noticed. I’ll still look into pinch zoom for ya regardless
Wow, great idea well executed, congrats
Ty
I love turning the trail length up and watching the air traffic patterns
Have you tried the record/playback features?
Pretty cool! I made something similar a while ago, and used cesium primarily.
Share it!
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!
this is really cool! can you make it interpolate and smoothly animate based on velocity and trajectory?
Could, yes.
I’ve tried it in 2d to pretty good success. It’s a bit low on my list of items to add, partially because I have a hunch that calculating and projecting thousands of vectors is going to cost more compute than simply accepting coordinates and drawing lines.
Modern CPUs do billions of floating point operations per second. Calculating and projecting thousands of vectors is pocket change. On a GPU it’s even more laughably small.
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.
This website is really cool; I love its clean and clear information display. The expanded panel on the side has a lot of configuration options, but I don't quite understand most of it.
I also followed you on Twitter; my name is winterx.
Bro, you could try creating a 3D version of the Earth using AI and Three.js. You'll gain 10 times more attention online.
Thanks for the note and follow!
I’ll have to experiment with a full 3-D globe. The only problem I foresee is the lag associated with rendering the thousands of global flights all at once.
This is amazingly cool
Don’t use “loom” in your product/company name. ChatGPT LOVES to suggest it, and it makes it obvious you used it.
Can you expand on that for me, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at
Ask ChatGPT to generate product or business names for you. A lot of them contain the word “loom”. I know someone who recently vibe coded a thing and had an AI name it and it also has “loom” in it.
I’m not suggesting that that’s what happened with this project. I have no idea how much AI they used for any of it. But “loom” seems to appear in a lot of ChatGPT generated product names lately.
I’ll have to look into that when renaming this. I didn’t do any product research before, and it looks like there are bike saddles, power generators, and mattresses all with the same name .
Any good name suggestions?
heirloom