Alternatives
Products that do what I made explorable +38M flights in a 3D visualization does
Hi HN, Since I was a kid, I have always been fascinated by the flight display screens at the airport wondering where I can fly direct if I had an open ticket There are more than 38 million commercial flights per year departing from +3,200 airports and served by +580 airlines! So much data that can be summarized and made accessible to everyone in an easy and convenient interface. Today, I’m releasing Direct flights, a tool to explore all non-stop flights from any airport: https://direct-flights.com/ # How it's made? The frontend is built on React - using a server-side rendering…
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Hey HN! Pilots everywhere are required to keep a logbook of all their flying hours, aircraft, airports, and so on. Since I track everything digitally (some people still just use paper logbooks!), I put together some data visualizations and a few 3D globes to show my flying history. This globe is probably my favourite so far: https://jameshard.ing/pilot/globes/all If you’ve got ideas for other graphs or ways to show this kind of data, I’d love to hear them!
2025 · jameshard.ing
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Hi HN! Sharing Random Airport Inspired by RandomStreetView (which I find weirdly addictive), and a passion for air travel. Probably not for everyone, but I hope some of you find it interesting! Needless to say, open to feedback! Enjoy clicking! Further reading: TECH: It's Build in React, NodeJS, with a Notion DB. The code is public on Github. It is spaghetti though ... Especially open to feedback here. DB: The db is publicly available (and editable), I can add the link in comments if anyone would like to have a look . KNOWN ISSUES: I would like to improve the design, pic loading performance…
2023 · randomairport.onrender.com
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I built a real-time flight tracker that renders 10,000+ aircraft on an interactive 3D globe, entirely in the browser using Rust compiled to WebAssembly.
Apr 2026 · flight-viz.com
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2021 · synergyjs.org
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Hello, I'd like to share a 3D plane tracking web app that I developed called: skies-adsb. Living near KMIA (a very busy airport), I spend a lot of time plane spotting and thought it would be cool to track planes in 3D. In October 2021, I built a prototype 3D ADS-B flight tracker called skies-adsb using p5.js. In April 2022, I released version 1.0 of skies-adsb, rewritten in Three.js. However, this release still relied on manual editing of GeoJSON layers. By late 2024, I had learned enough about GIS and GeoPandas to automate map creation using custom GeoJSON layers. During the Christmas…
2025 · github.com
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Sup HN, So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar, MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It’s called Shadowbroker. I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry, and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance. Getting this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm running this on a laptop…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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I made this site using R3F (https://github.com/pmndrs/react-three-fiber), a React renderer for 3JS (https://threejs.org/). The celestial bodies are Three.JS meshes. I used loaders (namely 'useLoader' from R3F and 'GLTFLoader' from 3JS) to import 3D models, such as International Space Station. More on loading models in R3F: https://docs.pmnd.rs/react-three-fiber/tutorials/loading-mod... I've future plans for this side project. It would be great to hear from the HN community before diving into them. Enjoy! P.S: Getting an empty…
2022 · spaceinbrowser.com
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2021 · github.com
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2017 · skysave.co
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Hey HN! A long time ago I built a map of trains at trains.fyi, and then realized nobody had bought planes.fyi - so this is my new map project. It's a bunch of things, but mostly, a 3D map of aircraft around given airports, as well as the weather, ATIS, and other data sources visualized in 3D and unique ways. Like most of the stuff I build, it's got no real use, but I think it's neat. If you like planes, check out the CYYZ/KJFK map, weather, and runway tabs - I put the most work into that. Also any feature requests, questions, comments, etc are always appreciated!
Dec 2025 · planes.fyi
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http://flightlite.com Flightlite is a visual flight tracker combining 3D and overhead views and flight information. It is my first launch since I started reading Hacker News and was developed as a side project for the past 6 months or so. I made the final push on it this morning to get it to a semi-launchable state. - The best coverage is US and UK - Sometimes the data I get is a bit crazy (spent a lot of effort to correct/sanitise it but it's not perfect) - Doesn't work in IE 64bit or Linux due to Google Earth not being available I'm now trying to work out how to take this further, if there…
2010
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So, this summer I was hunting for a flight from Calgary to Tokyo with WestJet, and I kept seeing these random cheaper flights popping up. I got tired of refreshing the site non-stop, so I whipped up a script to scrape the flight data. It paid off—I scored a roundtrip for $1000 CAD in July! Naturally, I decided to turn this into a full-fledged project and built flight-price-alert.com! Tech details: Built with Go for the backend and SQLite for the database. Added some TLS spoofing to get around Cloudflare’s JA3 fingerprinting that was blocking my requests. Styled the site with PicoCSS—it was…
2024 · flight-price-alert.com
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