The live sky · read off community receivers
Every aircraft overhead.
Drawn as it flies.
Pick a city — fifteen are on the dial, New York first — and the scope fills with everything the ADS-B network can hear inside your chosen radius: each aircraft a wedge pointed the way it is actually flying, wearing its callsign, trailing the path this page has watched it make. The board below says the rest — altitude, speed, squawk, how far out and on what bearing — nearest first.
The positions are broadcast by the aircraft themselves and heard by volunteers’ rooftop receivers, pooled at adsb.lol and read here through this site’s own thin relay — the upstream sends no CORS headers, so the page asks its own origin and the origin asks the sky. A fresh read every ten seconds, and only while you are watching.
15 cities on the dial · rings at 25 and 50 nm · a read every 10 seconds · receivers run by volunteers · drawn in your browser
The sky
One city. Everything airborne.
Choose the city and the radius; the scope reads the sky over it while you watch and says when it last did. Click a wedge to pin that aircraft’s row on the board below.
The scope
waiting for the sky
Not read yet.
The board
The same sky, in rows.
Everything the scope is drawing, listed nearest first: who it says it is, what it is, how high, how fast, climbing or descending, and how far from the centre of town. A squawk of 7500, 7600 or 7700 is an emergency and the row says so.
Aircraft
The board holds what the last read heard. An aircraft with no position broadcast is heard but not drawn.
About
A scope, not an air-traffic service.
The positions are ADS-B broadcasts — each aircraft saying aloud where it is — heard by community receivers on volunteers’ rooftops and pooled at adsb.lol. That upstream answers openly but sends no CORS headers, so a browser cannot read it directly; this page asks a thin relay on its own origin, which asks adsb.lol and hands the answer back unchanged. One hardcoded upstream, three validated numbers, a ten-second cache — the relay can fetch nothing else.
Coverage is exactly as good as the receivers below the sky in question, and no better. A gap on the scope may be an empty sky or an unheard one; over the open ocean and much of the world it is the latter. Positions are seconds old by the time they are drawn, trails are only what this page has itself watched since you arrived, and nothing is interpolated or predicted.
What the network does not say, the scope does not invent. An aircraft broadcasting no callsign is shown by its hex code; one broadcasting no position is counted but not drawn. Nothing here is an air-traffic service, and nobody should navigate, plan, or worry by it. Your city and radius are remembered in this browser and nowhere else.