I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D | Hacker News Reader

I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D

aeris.edbn.me

270 pointskewonit56 comments

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

Are you a member of the Kardashians?

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

Life imitates art imitates life.

heh believe it or not, it was flying over a small town in New Brunswick, Canada. Hardly glamorous, just coincidentally happened the first time I had the idea to chromecast the live flight and found Airloom. I perhaps overstated, as it's the first and only time their mom has ever flown without them :) (I could see in advance the flight path going over my dad's town, so had time to coordinate)

Love this story. I’m glad you found the app

As the maker of airloom I’m super impressed with this project and would also suggest supporting it. Nice work!

aw that's swell. thanks so so much for the tool, and I really hope it's bringing you as much benefit as it brought us!

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.

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

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.

The Departing / Arrival airports plus a full track would be absolutely amazing.

Glad to hear you’re adding origin/destination. I’ve seen other users mention it as well, but being able to quickly filter or search by country would also be very useful.

Modelling only the most common aircraft types sounds like a good approach.

With the ICAO type code, maybe you could group aircraft (wide-body / narrow-body / regional / cargo) to provide an accurate visual fallback when a specific 3D model isn’t available. Also, a slightly different shade for the generic aircraft could help signal that it’s just a placeholder rather than a real model.

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.

FL20 is 2000ft. Did you mean FL200?

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

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/

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

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.

Is there any way to make it stop rotating automatically?

You can disable the auto-orbit via the settings.

Very nice TY.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ah, I was hoping to see the full flightpaths in 3D space when you click on a plane, like on flightradar but then not just a flat line with colour.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

This very cool. Well done!

Why is vertical speed in m/s? It should be in fpm.

Looks flat to me ...

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

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

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

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

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.

Very cool! Have you considered rendering clouds?

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.

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

Excellent work! Well Done!

I love this

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?

this is awesome!

fsdfsd

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