5 ms·
Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker
- whizzter 11mo agoThis 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.
- TeeWEE 11mo agoThis is amazingly cool
- echelon 11mo agoThis 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 11mo agointeresting, seems to be random. I've gotten Portland which was also not too busy but nevertheless enough to understand the beauty of it.
- echelon 11mo agoThis thing is dangerous. It's going to nerd snipe me into a new hobby. https://imgur.com/a/264P9Q4 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 11mo agoNo, lean in! Haha I’m looking into adding better data providers so there are fewer missing planes.
- benlimner 11mo agoIt’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
- xgulfie 11mo agoWow, great idea well executed, congrats
- benlimner 11mo agoTy
- vibrio 11mo agoAs a bit of a Flight Aware addict, well done.
- benlimner 11mo agoCurious, what would make you default to this tool over FA?
- leptons 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoThanks for the feedback!
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoI love this, and would pay for native or electron app on Mac. Like Google Earth for global airspace.
- benlimner 11mo agoWorking on it!
- toomuchtodo 11mo agoLooking forward to it! Anywhere to donate or otherwise contribute financially towards this project?
- ho_schi 11mo agoPlease. No Electron!
- benlimner 11mo agoWhy not?
- ho_schi 11mo agohttps://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/ 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 11mo agoI 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 11mo agoNote 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 https://x.com/benlimner, or join the mailing list for updates/suggestions!
- ProllyInfamous 11mo agoI 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.
- benlimner 11mo agoGive 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.
- ProllyInfamous 11mo agoAt a minimum: If your resumé previously lacked page 2, it no longer does. 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!
- teraflop 11mo agoCool 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.)
- acrophiliac 11mo agoAs 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 11mo agoA second monitor running this in surf mode might be a close second
- schappim 11mo agoPlanes flying w/ multiple transponders [1]? [1] https://files.littlebird.com.au/Screenshot-2025-11-29-at-8.27.31-am.png https://files.littlebird.com.au/Screenshot-2025-11-29-at-8.2...
- benlimner 11mo agoThey’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 11mo agoReally nice! Absolutely killer would be integrating with https://www.liveatc.net/ 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 11mo agoCompletely agree. I think the concept has legs enough to actually start paying for some of these more expensive data providers.
- thot_experiment 11mo agoSuper 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.
- benlimner 11mo agoI 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_experiment 11mo agoCan 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.
- walletdrainer 11mo agohttps://www.adsbexchange.com/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/
- purplecats 11mo agothis is really cool! can you make it interpolate and smoothly animate based on velocity and trajectory?
- benlimner 11mo agoCould, 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_mercer 11mo agoModern 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 11mo agoPretty cool! I made something similar a while ago, and used cesium primarily.
- benlimner 11mo agoShare it!
- sfifs 11mo agoThis is fabulous. I wonder if something like this with 3D vision could make air traffic control much safer?
- bibimsz 11mo agoI love turning the trail length up and watching the air traffic patterns
- benlimner 11mo agoHave you tried the record/playback features?
- believec 11mo agoThis is pretty amazing. It would be pretty cool if clicking on plane shows additional info of plan like destination
- benlimner 11mo agoThere is some info you can get if you click the plane, then click the call sign
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- frankhsu 11mo agoThis 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.
- benlimner 11mo agoThanks 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 11mo agoI’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 11mo agoIt looks very nice. It's a nifty project. However, as the particular kind of weirdo who has a bookmark to https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ 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.
- benlimner 11mo agoMaybe this will be something you look at to review interesting flights, or near misses?
- ed_mercer 11mo agoI'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 11mo agoI tried Firefox Android, it instantly loaded a 3D view of a 2D map projection with glowing planes at an airport
- benlimner 11mo agoNo glitch. It’s purposefully limited upon initial load. Adjust the search radius to increase your view range
- dmazin 11mo agoDon’t use “loom” in your product/company name. ChatGPT LOVES to suggest it, and it makes it obvious you used it.
- CarVac 11mo agoheirloom
- benlimner 11mo agoCan you expand on that for me, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at
- dmazin 11mo agoAsk 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.
- benlimner 11mo agoI’ll have to look into that when renaming this. I didn’t do any product research before, and it looks like there are bike saddles, power generators, and mattresses all with the same name . Any good name suggestions?
- scoot 11mo agoVery 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…
- scoot 11mo agoVery 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 11mo agoPrivate 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.
- benlimner 11mo agoThere’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
- benlimner 11mo agoCan 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 11mo agoIt just sits at "Initializing 3D Space". I don't get anything else.
- 1000100_1000101 11mo agoNeat project. Minor usability note, zooming by pinch on a MacBook trackpad is painfully slow.
- benlimner 11mo agoThanks for the note. I hear you on the zoom pain. What would be your preferred means of zooming?
- 1000100_1000101 11mo agoPinch 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_1000101 11mo agoJust noticed you also support scroll to zoom, and it works at a decent speed.
- benlimner 11mo agoI’m glad you noticed. I’ll still look into pinch zoom for ya regardless
- ryandrake 11mo agoVery 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.
- benlimner 11mo agoThanks 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 11mo agoThis 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!
- benlimner 11mo agoYeah that is a good move. I’ll add this to the short list
- xnx 11mo agoVery 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?).