Airloom – 3D Flight Tracker

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall reception

  • Many commenters call the 3D visualization “amazing”, “mind-blowing”, and “dangerously” engaging, especially when watching takeoffs/landings and long trails over time.
  • Several mention bookmarking it, running it on a second monitor, or wanting it as a screensaver.

Visualization & UX feedback

  • Altitude scaling: default vertical scale makes climbs look too steep; reducing to 1.0 improves realism. Early bug where rescaling left “stair-step” trails was fixed.
  • Planes sometimes appear to clip through terrain or hover above runways; attributed to terrain meshes, pressure-altitude vs MSL handling, and edge cases in ground elevation.
  • Airspace overlays are useful for pilots but sometimes fail to load after searching.
  • Requests: smoother motion via interpolation, hiding ground when camera goes below it, option to remove glow effect, clearer side-panel controls, and quicker pinch-zoom on trackpads.

Maps, airports & performance

  • Initial airport selection is a random set of ~20 US airports; users want defaults that are busier and/or currently in daylight, plus a “near me” mode (now supported via ?airport=nearme).
  • Strong desire for higher‑resolution map tiles and optional FAA sectional charts; current provider has rate‑limit and outage issues, prompting discussion of self-hosting or paid tiles and low-detail fallbacks.
  • Performance is generally smooth, but some report periodic stutters on certain Macs and very slow pinch-zoom.

Use cases & comparisons

  • Compared to FlightAware and ADSBexchange, this is seen more as a beautiful overview/visualization or for replaying interesting flights, not for detailed operational tracking.
  • Ideas include integration with LiveATC, VR/3D versions, educational uses for student pilots, and special flights (Zero‑G, fighter training, balloons).

Project direction & tooling

  • Built by a solo developer in spare time; people discuss monetization, premium features (saved presets), and naming.
  • Some want a native desktop app; others warn against Electron due to bloat and advocate native toolkits or sticking with the web app.