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.
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.
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.
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)
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
without an airport near "my current location" is my goto.
is there a direct link for this? (otherwise i may hack together some userscript that clicks that button for me...)
"my assumption" would have been some x/y/angle/zoom params on the url, maybe even with some of the settings encoded in... (autorotate, render-radius or terrain height would be first to come to mind)
my "not getting any tiles" must have been 2 or 3 days ago - and from the last time i had to mess with tiles i do remember that to be fairly ugly in regards to performance/scaling so i feel you ;)
also addon after trying the "direct link to an airport":
- this still loads at the random-US-airport first. with some tweaking there is likely an entire tilefetch you can save^
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 rel…
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?
Yes, it was supposed to be an alternative graphic for a cockpit radar display in a jet fighter. The goal for any such display is to convey maximum information at a glance. I got feedback from a fighter pilot who said he wouldn't use it. Most people don't think in 3D, they think in 2D. Pilots have to think in 3D to some extent, but in a battle a fighter pilot wants to know what they immediately need to pay attention to, which is usually something heading directly at them (another jet or missile) and they mostly want to know the direction it is coming from, not so much what its altitude is. I made the path histories fade out so they didn't get too long and clutter the screen. The vertical bars were calibrated to indicate a specific distance so they also gave an idea of velocity. It would be possible to add/remove things from the display based on some automatic assessments of priority (i.e., remove everything not headed at the pilot, though having things appear and disappear can be confusing also). The aircraft icons were actual wireframe models representing the type of the aircraft, but had to be oversize to see them, which added some confusion also. The pilot found a fixed size icon with a few numbers next to it and highlighting for approaching/receding much more useful. Took me a long time to digitize them with just a ruler. While such a display may not have a technical use, it might be useful in advertising, showing travelers at an airport what is going on around the airport at the moment for example.
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…
EWR is fascinating to look at because there are three major airports in one area with all sorts of approach and departure angles.
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!
I got one random plane that was black instead of color-coded by altitude. Bug?
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.