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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.