Every plane you see in the sky – you can now follow it from the cockpit in 3D

ELI5 / TLDR

Someone built a free browser tool that lets you ride along in the cockpit of any plane currently in the air, rendered in real 3D with actual terrain and buildings below. It pulls live position data from OpenSky Network and FlightRadar24, interpolates between updates so the flight looks smooth, and overlays a heads-up display with altitude, speed, heading, and flight phase. Think Google Earth meets a flight simulator, except every dot on the screen is a real aircraft.

The Full Story

What it actually is

Flight Viz is a real-time flight tracker built as a web app — no install, no account, just open a browser. The cockpit view is one feature of a larger platform that also includes a 3D globe view, airport departure boards for 192 airports, weather radar overlays, and aircraft detail pages. The cockpit page is the party trick: pick any live flight, and you’re looking out the windshield.

How the sausage gets made

The rendering stack is surprisingly muscular for a browser app. The core engine is Rust compiled to WebAssembly with raw WebGL2 shaders — not a JavaScript framework sitting on top of a library, but hand-rolled graphics code. The cockpit view specifically layers in Cesium.js for 3D terrain, pulls Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for buildings and landmarks (with OpenStreetMap as a fallback), and uses Leaflet.js for a toggleable minimap in the corner.

Live flight data comes from a server endpoint polled every 15 seconds. Between polls, the app dead-reckons — it takes the last known speed, heading, and vertical rate, then extrapolates where the plane should be right now. That’s what keeps the flight looking smooth instead of jumping in 15-second leaps. The camera pitch adjusts dynamically: tilted slightly down at low altitude (negative 5 degrees), more steeply at cruise (negative 15 degrees), mimicking how a pilot’s gaze shifts with phase of flight.

The HUD and flight phase

A heads-up display shows altitude, ground speed, and heading. The app also auto-detects whether the aircraft is climbing, cruising, or descending based on vertical rate — a nice touch that adds context without requiring any input. A trail of the last 500 position points draws on the minimap, so you can see where the flight has been.

What you need

A modern browser with WebGL2 support. That’s it. The URL accepts parameters for latitude, longitude, altitude, heading, speed, and callsign, so you can deep-link directly to a specific aircraft.

Claude’s Take

This is a genuinely impressive piece of browser engineering. Rust-to-WASM with hand-rolled WebGL2 shaders is not the easy path — whoever built this chose performance over convenience and it shows. The dead reckoning between 15-second polls is a smart design choice that makes the whole experience feel real-time even though the data isn’t.

The score of 7 reflects that this is a cool technical showcase with real utility for aviation nerds, but the Hacker News post is essentially a product launch — there’s no deep technical writeup, no architecture blog post, no source code to dig through. You get the tool itself and whatever you can infer from the JavaScript. It’s the kind of project where the demo is the documentation, which is fine, but it limits how much you can actually learn from it versus just enjoy it.

Worth bookmarking. Worth ten minutes of following a transatlantic flight over Greenland. Not a deep read.