Flight Tracker Demo | Source on GitHub
Flight Tracker is an impressive Three.js project that simulates global air traffic in real time. While the visualization is currently powered by simulated flight data, the developer has indicated plans to integrate real-time feeds in the future.
For now, if you are interested in real-time flight tracking maps you can view Flightradar24 and Flightaware, or study 3D flight traffic over 130 major airports on Air Loom.
Built with vanilla JavaScript and Three.js, Flight Tracker renders more than 34,000 flight trajectories sweeping across a 3D globe. The flights follow elegant curved arcs that dynamically adjust altitude based on distance, helping to create a believable sense of global movement. The visualization’s environmental effects are particularly effective. A dynamic sunlight model produces realistic day and night cycles, while atmospheric scattering and a subtle starfield background add depth to the scene.
Under the hood, the project relies heavily on GPU-accelerated rendering techniques to handle thousands of simultaneous flights efficiently, including instanced rendering and shader-based animation.
