Show HN: Planes.fyi – 3D aircraft and airport visualizations (opens in new tab)

(planes.fyi)

8 pointsryry3mo ago2 comments

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!

2 comments

wooben3mo ago

Very cool. I remember liking trains.fyi when it went around HN a while back, keep up the good work and thank you for sharing such cool projects!

My antiquated (2016 xeon quad-core) PC chugged for a while running this in Firefox (snap) on Ubuntu, and it eventually crashed while I was angling the map close to the ground. CPU cranked up to 80% on each core.

A few questions: - While angling around, it was easy to go under the map, could you set a boundary so the camera cannot go below the horizon? - Would you be able to add the ability to enter an address, so I can get a view that would be comparable to what I'd see if I stood in that same place outside? Maybe you could even add an AR element similar to the SkyMap app on Android.

ryryOP3mo ago

Appreciate it!

So it's pretty compute intensive - my machine also doesn't love it. I wanted to get the general gist of it out there before optimizing, but I'll try my best.

For the below the horizon bit - that was the only way I could get the map to fully render when at a low tilt angle. If I enabled the stop at the ground layer, it would stop rendering the map at close distances (not fully sure why), so it sits like this for now.

The enter an address thing is a great idea, and definitely possible! I'll add it to the road map!

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