nowfound

Life & fun · September 26, 2019

IM

I made explorable +38M flights in a 3D visualization

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…

I made explorable +38M flights in a 3D visualization launched on September 26, 2019 with 5 votes, #1,275 of 3,296 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches.

Alternatives

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

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…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • Direct Flights2019 · direct-flights.com · ▲295

    Explore all non-stop flights from any airport ✈️🌎

  • IM
    I'm an airline pilot – I built interactive graphs/globes of my flights2025 · jameshard.ing · ▲1,539

    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!

  • Random Aerial Airport Views2023 · randomairport.onrender.com · ▲175

    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…

  • Flight-Viz – 10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of Rust+WASMApr 2026 · flight-viz.com · ▲101

    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.

  • SkyAlliance Travel2019 · apps.apple.com · ▲71

    Compare cheap flight + hotel prices across the world.

  • Microsoft Flight Simulator2020 · xbox.com · ▲376

    First new release in 14 years, now in real-time 4K 🛩

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, September 2019

the whole month →
  • Terms & Conditions Generator by iubenda▲891

    Attorney-approved terms and conditions generator

    Dev tools · 2019 · iubenda.com

  • See a Satellite Tonight. No Telescope Required▲863

    Satellites 🛰️ are visible in the night sky, no telescope required, if you know where to look. Find out here.

    Life & fun · 2019 · james.darpinian.com

  • 100,000 Faces▲845

    Free resource of 100k diverse faces generated by AI

    AI · 2019 · generated.photos

  • Cyberpunk web design made easy, really easy▲775

    Life & fun · 2019 · augmented-ui.com

  • Browse Reddit in 3D▲720

    Life & fun · 2019 · 3dforreddit.com

  • AS
    A Senior Engineer's CheckList▲662

    Sharing something that I wrote for my use but I think can be useful to others (I am an engineer with the title of Senior Software Engineer) Visit [1] for a full list (table view gives a lot of options. See "Controls"). Visit [2] for a summary. The source of the list is at [3] 1. https://littleblah.com/post/2019-09-01-senior-engineer-checklist/ 2. https://medium.com/@littleblah/my-top-25-items-in-a-senior-engineers-checklist-c8e9f9f6e3c2 3. https://github.com/littleblah/senior-engineer-checklist Feedbacks/Pull requests…

    Dev tools · 2019