Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

https://objectiveunclear.com/airloom.html

by azinman2 • 8 months ago

273 106 8 months ago

whizzter• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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

benlimner42• 8 months ago

I fixed the altitude scale issue.

TeeWEE• 8 months ago

This is amazingly cool

echelon2• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

interesting, seems to be random. I've gotten Portland which was also not too busy but nevertheless enough to understand the beauty of it.

echelon2• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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!

uyzstvqs• 8 months ago

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

CarVac4• 8 months ago

EWR is fascinating to look at because there are three major airports in one area with all sorts of approach and departure angles.

xgulfie• 8 months ago

Wow, great idea well executed, congrats

benlimner42• 8 months ago

vibrio• 8 months ago

As a bit of a Flight Aware addict, well done.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Curious, what would make you default to this tool over FA?

leptons• 8 months ago

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.

toomuchtodo2• 8 months ago

I love this, and would pay for native or electron app on Mac. Like Google Earth for global airspace.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Working on it!

toomuchtodo2• 8 months ago

Looking forward to it! Anywhere to donate or otherwise contribute financially towards this project?

ho_schi2• 8 months ago

Please. No Electron!

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Why not?

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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!

ProllyInfamous3• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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.

teraflop• 8 months ago

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.)

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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.

rapjr93• 8 months ago

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?

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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?

Stevvo• 8 months ago

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.

HWR_14• 8 months ago

which doesn't work for the colorblind

Does the military have colorblind pilots?

g4cg54g542• 8 months ago

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)

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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

tgsovlerkhgsel• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

I’ll try!

Also watching the high altitude balloons pop and fall straight through traffic is awesome

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Oh and you should check out the fighter jet training around San Antonio

CarVac4• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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.

Havoc• 8 months ago

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

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Sounds like a fun challenge

crowbahr• 8 months ago

What data source are you using? AeroAPI?

acrophiliac• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

A second monitor running this in surf mode might be a close second

schappim• 8 months ago

Planes flying w/ multiple transponders [1]?

[1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Screenshot-2025-11-29-at-8.2...

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Completely agree. I think the concept has legs enough to actually start paying for some of these more expensive data providers.

thot_experiment2• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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.

thot_experiment2• 8 months ago

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.

purplecats• 8 months ago

this is really cool! can you make it interpolate and smoothly animate based on velocity and trajectory?

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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.

ed_mercer2• 8 months ago

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.

tamimio• 8 months ago

Pretty cool! I made something similar a while ago, and used cesium primarily.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Share it!

sfifs• 8 months ago

This is fabulous. I wonder if something like this with 3D vision could make air traffic control much safer?

bibimsz• 8 months ago

I love turning the trail length up and watching the air traffic patterns

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Have you tried the record/playback features?

believec• 8 months ago

This is pretty amazing. It would be pretty cool if clicking on plane shows additional info of plan like destination

benlimner42• 8 months ago

There is some info you can get if you click the plane, then click the call sign

frankhsu• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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.

stefanv• 8 months ago

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?

compass_copium• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Maybe this will be something you look at to review interesting flights, or near misses?

ed_mercer2• 8 months ago

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.

yonatan8070• 8 months ago

I tried Firefox Android, it instantly loaded a 3D view of a 2D map projection with glowing planes at an airport

benlimner42• 8 months ago

No glitch. It’s purposefully limited upon initial load. Adjust the search radius to increase your view range

dmazin2• 8 months ago

Don’t use “loom” in your product/company name. ChatGPT LOVES to suggest it, and it makes it obvious you used it.

CarVac4• 8 months ago

heirloom

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Can you expand on that for me, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at

dmazin2• 8 months ago

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.

scoot2• 8 months ago

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…

scoot2• 8 months ago

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!

urlig8746• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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

OSS542• 8 months ago

It just sits at "Initializing 3D Space". I don't get anything else.

1000100_10001013• 8 months ago

Neat project.

Minor usability note, zooming by pinch on a MacBook trackpad is painfully slow.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Thanks for the note. I hear you on the zoom pain. What would be your preferred means of zooming?

1000100_10001013• 8 months ago

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.

1000100_10001013• 8 months ago

Just noticed you also support scroll to zoom, and it works at a decent speed.

ryandrake• 8 months ago

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.

benlimner42• 8 months ago

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.

saithier• 8 months ago

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!

benlimner42• 8 months ago

Yeah that is a good move. I’ll add this to the short list

xnx• 8 months ago

Very cool. I don't think the glow effect on the plane adds anything and somewhat obscures them. Would be slick if there was a way to smooth the motion (delay one update and interpolate?).

Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

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