I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D
aeris.edbn.me

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169 points

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kewonit

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7 hours ago

43 comments

patcon ・ 5 hours ago

I love airloom[1], but since yours is open source, I'll try to make use of it next time, and contribute code or ideas :)

Fwiw, my use-case is simply throwing it on the TV as a screensaver of sorts for my nephews when someone they know is travelling. Just a way to make the world seem smaller!

It's led to some cute situations where their mom was flying almost directly over my dad living in our childhood home, and we video called him and directed him to the spot in the sky where my sister (his daughter) was flying over. Her kids were ecstatic. We live in interesting times

[1]: https://objectiveunclear.com/airloom.html

  • borborigmus ・ 5 hours ago

    Are you a member of the Kardashians?

    • stronglikedan ・ 5 hours ago

      Aren't we all in some way, if not just a little?

Liftyee ・ an hour ago

Neat project, but it looks like you forgot to convert the world into 3D too :P

Mercator projection looks really strange when you look at it sideways to see the layers of aircraft, but the world doesn't fall away on the horizon.

It would be really cool to visualise the sightlines available when on a flight at 10km altitude.

0_-_0 ・ an hour ago

beautiful! my only issue was the trails are not consistent with the vertical speed -- it appears they curve even if the plane is descending (see the sfo arrivals and how they appear to be "stepping" down). Airloom solves this by not rendering trails until after the plane has moved.

wolvoleo ・ 4 hours ago

Great app/site!! Only thing I'm missing is a jump to here button (using GPS to switch to my location on the map)

fwipsy ・ an hour ago

This is cool! It's funny reading through the comics and most of them are asking for more features.

Is the vertical distance to scale? Jets look a little higher than they should be to me.

sledprocyon ・ 5 hours ago

This is really cool. Have you considered showing the aircraft model/type? Since the ICAO24 is already available, a lookup could add it.

  • kewonit ・ 5 hours ago

    That is definitely up there in the todo, I wanted to try and render out 3d aircraft models too, if i could even get like 10-15 commonly used models and keep rest generic, it would still improve the viewing experience by a lot, for now the next update would for sure indicate the model number and the origin/destination on hover itself.

  • connoronthejob ・ 3 hours ago

    Agreed. Seeing a 737 airplane flying at 1000ft over my office made me a little concerned for a second. FlightRadar24 uses a few standard type aircraft icons.

    The altitude seems a little off - is it supposed to be to scale? Some aircraft flying around 1,000-3,000 ft looked closer to FL20 from my experience as a passenger and pilot.

wongarsu ・ 6 hours ago

Looks cool to look at. Something that would be cool to have in an airport lounge, or just any public space near an airport

I wonder how feasible it would be to render all airplanes at once, not just those near the chosen airport. A quick google says there are about 12-14k planes in the air at any given time, which sounds reasonable to render with some optimizations

  • kewonit ・ 5 hours ago

    I currently use opensky network api on the client side itself using their anon user thing, which limits me to burn credits, it could in practice load the entire world but you would get rate limited pretty much instantly by opensky.

    For the same reason, I made it open source, you can throw in your keys in there and can render all the flights, but keeping it open and free was the priority here, so had to compromise on the distance, but within a given city it has all the flights accurately.

altmanaltman ・ 4 hours ago

That altitude scale could use something that makes logical sense than the seemingly random colors? Like its super hard to tell it by the color without knowing the index.

ge96 ・ 5 hours ago

I was wondering, I flew about 1,100 miles one way then back (no stops). The first path we were very high up I'd assume like 30K feet, the way back we flew I'd say 10K feet, much lower. I was wondering why.

  • rkangel ・ 5 hours ago

    Possibly to do with how the jet streams were at that time.

    For longer flights, large passenger aircraft will generally aim for something like 30k feet - the thinner air means less air resistance so more fuel efficiency (the cost is the fuel required to get there, which is why I said "for longer flights").

    However, at that altitude the "jet stream" can cause winds of 100+ mph. This can be helpful with your direction of travel, or it can slow you down. If the jet stream was strong and trying to blow you backwards, it may have been more efficient to travel at a lower altitude where the jet stream wasn't present.

  • ultrarunner ・ 2 hours ago

    For a long & low trip like that, ATC staffing is a common story. Higher sectors not having the manpower leads to clearance delays, and this is a somewhat common workaround for that somewhat rare situation.

  • lovecg ・ 3 hours ago

    If this was a jet there’s no good technical reason for it to stay so low, but one common reason could be air traffic control congestion, you go through different sectors at 10k than you would at 30k so it’s sometimes feasible to go lower and avoid long delays.

  • naberhausj ・ 5 hours ago

    There are many factors that could have contributed to this (airspace restrictions, turbulence, etc...), but usually altitudes are selected based on the prevailing winds. You want as strong of a tailwind, or at least as weak of a headwind as possible.

MobileVet ・ 6 hours ago

Fantastic. Nice work using color as additional altitude information.

Maybe I missed it, but it is always fun to see the origin and destination when looking at flight tracks.

whywhywhywhy ・ 4 hours ago

it's 3D but I can't go first person mode on the planes feels a missed opportunity

rtkwe ・ 5 hours ago

That's fun. Having helicopters and their entire flight trails would be neat too.

rustyhancock ・ 2 hours ago

Utterly beautiful I never appreciated the 3D structure of flights coming in and flying out of airports but it's so cool.

How challenging would it be to create a VR experience to view it?

amelius ・ 6 hours ago

Looks flat to me ...

  • wongarsu ・ 6 hours ago

    Some mountain airports might be quite interesting with 3d terrain

    But that's not what this is. Here only the airplanes are in the third dimension. The world map isn't even a globe

    • kewonit ・ 6 hours ago

      still working on adding a custom terrain map, so its more realistic to view, while the globe part is just pure skill issue, i tried a few different approaches but wasn't able to code that in

    • netsharc ・ 4 hours ago

      My local airport is at 1417ft MSL, so the planes start and land in mid-air.

  • shakow ・ 6 hours ago

    Use the double-arrow buttons to change the view angle.

    • speedgoose ・ 6 hours ago

      I think it’s a comment stating that it’s a flat image without depth.

      A non flat visualisation is what you could see for example on a 3D screen, augmented reality, or virtual reality.

NetOpWibby ・ 4 hours ago

The planes look like swords, made me think Cloud Strife was going outta control with his Smash special.

jessekv ・ 6 hours ago

Very cool! Have you considered rendering clouds?

adolph ・ 3 hours ago

I wonder how this could be inverted to display the "planes overhead" [0] (so little progress in 15 years) in AR similar to how SkyView [1] displays points of interest in space.

0. https://tech.yahoo.com/phones/article/2011-11-26-siri-wolfra...

1. https://www.terminaleleven.com/skyview/iphone/

  • bobchadwick ・ 2 hours ago

    I just did this last week, mostly using Claude Code. I live close to a major airport and wanted to be alerted when interesting planes are flying overhead. The PWA Claude Code spit out is exactly what I was hoping for, and adding an AR overlay was really trivial.

    It's amazing and in some ways frightening that I had an interesting problem, and within a couple hours I had a fully functional app that completely solved it.

  • echoangle ・ 2 hours ago

    Flightradar has the AR thing for airplanes, and had it for many years now, I think.

superkuh ・ 6 hours ago

See also, https://objectiveunclear.com/airloom.html?airport=MSP . Another very nice 3D viewer for adsb info.

Both this post's viewer and the older one I linked directly above have greatly exaggerated vertical scaling. It is not proportional to the distances on the map. With actual 1:1 height scale all these planes, even the stratospheric jets, would be much closer to the ground.

  • kewonit ・ 5 hours ago

    Currently it servers more aesthetically than accuracy when it comes to vertical scaling, its on the feature list to add 1:1 height scale, it isn't as pleasing to look at but definitely a must have.

    • wolvoleo ・ 4 hours ago

      I think the current scale is a good solution. Otherwise the vertical data is too compressed when you zoom out

    • superkuh ・ 5 hours ago

      Nice to hear. Just as an aside, the one I linked already has a (deep in the settings) setting to adjust the vertical scaling. But even at minimum 0.2 ~ 0.3 scale it's still not 1:1.

      • kewonit ・ 4 hours ago

        So I did play around with it for a while, and one thing that I kept running into is how dysfunctional the entire thing becomes at that scale, it looks really good surprisingly, yet the usability gets really limiting, and makes it X times harder to use, a logarithmic solution might be better here I believe.