05 / Project / Jul 2025
Flightonics
A live global flight tracker that streams real aircraft paths across a radar-style world map.
- Automatic data refresh
- 1h
- Global aircraft positions
- Live
Overview
Inspired by FlightRadar24, Flightonics is a minimal, Matrix-style map of live air traffic, something that could double as a screensaver or wallpaper. Every aircraft becomes a glowing neon streak moving along its real flight path over a dark world map.
How it works
The app authenticates to the OpenSky Network API with OAuth 2 client credentials, pulls current state vectors for aircraft worldwide and fetches each flight's recent trajectory. A Flask backend runs a scheduled export job in a background thread, refreshing the data every hour into a JSON feed, after cleaning and validating each path and stitching on the aircraft's current position.
The map
The frontend is built on Leaflet.js with CARTO tiles, filtered into a dark
radar look. Each streak animates with requestAnimationFrame, and haversine
great-circle interpolation keeps the motion between waypoints smooth and
geographically accurate. The page polls the feed's Last-Modified header and
reloads itself as soon as new data lands.