Planes.fyi
3D aircraft and airport visualizations
Details
- External ID
- 46303261
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Planes.fyi
- Website domain
- planes.fyi
- Launched
- Dec. 17, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4217557251908397
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Travel & hospitality
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- 3d visualizations of aircraft and airports
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 130 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #83 of 131 (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 0.51
- Tokyo Trains · hn · 2026-08-11 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- nonstopflightsfrom.com · ph · 2026-09-10 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- 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 0.46
- Flight-Viz · hn · 2026-04-01 · 101 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Visualize Model Spikiness in 3D · hn · 2026-07-02 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Live Flight Tracker Map · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.