[HN Gopher] Airloom - 3D Flight Tracker
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Airloom - 3D Flight Tracker
Author : azinman2
Score : 113 points
Date : 2025-11-28 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (objectiveunclear.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (objectiveunclear.com)
| whizzter wrote:
| 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.
| kyusan0 wrote:
| 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.
| nja wrote:
| 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
| benlimner wrote:
| I'll fix that.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| This is amazingly cool
| echelon wrote:
| 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?
| hazelnut wrote:
| interesting, seems to be random. I've gotten Portland which was
| also not too busy but nevertheless enough to understand the
| beauty of it.
| echelon wrote:
| 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.
| benlimner wrote:
| No, lean in! Haha
|
| I'm looking into adding better data providers so there are
| fewer missing planes.
| benlimner wrote:
| 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
| benlimner wrote:
| 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!
| xgulfie wrote:
| Wow, great idea well executed, congrats
| benlimner wrote:
| Ty
| vibrio wrote:
| As a bit of a Flight Aware addict, well done.
| benlimner wrote:
| Curious, what would make you default to this tool over FA?
| leptons wrote:
| 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.
| benlimner wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I love this, and would pay for native or electron app on Mac.
| Like Google Earth for global airspace.
| benlimner wrote:
| Working on it!
| ho_schi wrote:
| Please. No Electron!
| benlimner wrote:
| Why not?
| ho_schi wrote:
| 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.
| somethingsome wrote:
| 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.
| benlimner wrote:
| 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!
| acrophiliac wrote:
| 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.
| benlimner wrote:
| A second monitor running this in surf mode might be a close
| second
| schappim wrote:
| Planes flying w/ multiple transponders [1]?
|
| [1]
| https://files.littlebird.com.au/Screenshot-2025-11-29-at-8.2...
| benlimner wrote:
| 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.
| tpoindex wrote:
| 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.
| benlimner wrote:
| Completely agree. I think the concept has legs enough to
| actually start paying for some of these more expensive data
| providers.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 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.
| purplecats wrote:
| this is really cool! can you make it interpolate and smoothly
| animate based on velocity and trajectory?
| tamimio wrote:
| Pretty cool! I made something similar a while ago, and used
| cesium primarily.
| sfifs wrote:
| This is fabulous. I wonder if something like this with 3D vision
| could make air traffic control much safer?
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