Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker
objectiveunclear.com
objectiveunclear.com
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!
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?
Form and function (or something).
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?
Does the military have colorblind pilots?
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.)
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.
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.
But if nothing comes of it, I’ve had a ball making it, and chatting with the community.
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.
The scale change one will be easy to sort out. The black one is a little harder, sometimes the adsb data comes in corrupted.
Also watching the high altitude balloons pop and fall straight through traffic is awesome
also "copy this view" does nothing (neither location nor any settings, gives just the bare link)
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
"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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
You’re getting New Orleans because it’s truly selecting from ~20 random US airports.
Stoked that you like the app!
What about OSM Carto?[0] It's free and open-source.
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.
I’m looking into adding better data providers so there are fewer missing planes.
If there’s an airport you want to default to, search for it and save the URL
Try loading airspace on one of the default random airports & let me know if it still doesn’t work for you
Not reproducible on Windows Edge or Firefox, on a RX 5700, where it's consistently smooth.
It’s definitely a chrome-first app at this point.
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.
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!
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…
[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Screenshot-2025-11-29-at-8.2...
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!
Minor usability note, zooming by pinch on a MacBook trackpad is painfully slow.
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.
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.
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.
There are very good electron apps, but the engineering to make them small and fast is quite important.
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.
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.
Any good name suggestions?