Planes.fyi
3D aircraft and airport visualizations
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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!
HN · launched Dec 17, 2025 · 8 upvotes (top 58%) · 0 views
Niche: interactive mapping platforms · 191 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▲ +7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Travel & hospitality
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 191 launches in interactive mapping platforms →
Could you build this?
Partial While the Three.js/Cesium 3D frontend can be generated with AI assistance, aggregating and streaming low-latency flight tracking and aviation weather telemetry at scale requires dedicated streaming infrastructure.
What it would actually take: The product utilizes a WebGL/Three.js or Mapbox/Cesium client ingesting real-time ADS-B feeds (e.g., FlightAware, ADS-B Exchange) alongside parsed NOAA METAR/TAF weather feeds via WebSockets. The primary difficulty is efficiently spatial-indexing thousands of simultaneous coordinate updates and handling high-concurrency pub/sub pipelines without lagging the client renderer. This requires expertise in spatial databases, geospatial data pipelines, and optimized WebGL scene management.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: trains.fyi, SkyMap app (Android)
Concerns raised: High CPU usage causing crashes on older machines, Performance issues with Firefox on Ubuntu, Camera goes below ground/horizon at low tilt angles
Feature requests: Enter address to view specific locations, AR element to show real-world comparison, Camera boundary to prevent going below horizon
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 300 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #165 of 301 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 47 days after the earliest competitor.
- New 3D Mapping website · hn · 2026-01-23 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Tokyo Trains · hn · 2026-08-11 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Overhead · hn · 2026-11-06 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Aviation Gazetteer v2 · ph · 2026-10-10 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- nonstopflightsfrom.com · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Odd Orbit · ph · 2026-10-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Offline-first UK train planner · hn · 2026-03-24 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- The Official National Train Map Sucked, So I Made My Own · hn · 2025-12-21 · 77 upvotes · similarity 0.47
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