The next generation of flight-tracking maps has arrived!
I am a huge fan of live flight-tracking maps like Flightradar24, ADS-B Exchange and FlightAware. These popular websites all show planes moving in real time on top of a 2D map. Recently Air Loom introduced the concept of a 3D air-traffic map to bring a whole new level of immersion to flight tracking. Unlike traditional flight maps, Air Loom displays aircraft in a fully rotatable, tilt-enabled 3D environment. You can zoom in to see holding patterns unwind above an airport and tilt the camera to compare the relative altitudes of the planes in view.
Unfortunately Air Loom does not provide worldwide coverage and only allows you to visualize the airspace over around 130 major airports. However, now we have Aeris – a new real-time 3D flight tracker that pushes the idea of altitude-aware mapping even further.
Aeris renders live air traffic around the whole world. On this global map aircraft are separated vertically in true 3D, with lower-altitude flights glowing cyan while higher-level traffic shifts toward gold. The effect makes it surprisingly easy to understand the layered structure of crowded skies at a glance.
The interface is also impressively fluid. Select a city and the camera glides smoothly to that airspace with a spring-eased animation that feels more cinematic than functional – but in a way that makes exploring the map genuinely enjoyable. Rather than simply watching planes crawl across a flat projection, Aeris invites you to explore the sky as a dynamic volume.
Aeris does not yet provide the deep data backend available on the longer-established flight-tracking services like Flightradar24, ADS-B Exchange and FlightAware. On those platforms you can click on individual aircraft to view detailed telemetry, routes, aircraft types, registration information, airline data and often even historical flight playback. Aeris, for now, is more about visualizing air traffic than interrogating it.
But that focus on visualization is precisely what makes Aeris interesting. It hints at what the next generation of flight tracking could look like – less like observing radar and more like observing a true living model of the sky.
