A guide to everything on the map, written for someone seeing it for the first time.
This site is not an approved source of aeronautical or meteorological information. Use it for curiosity and exploration, not in place of an official FAA preflight briefing. Data here is unofficial, may be delayed, incomplete or simply wrong, and can disappear without warning.
The page opens on a full-screen map centred over Atlanta. It will offer to move to your location after you pan or zoom — that is a browser-side operation that is not sent to this site.
Almost everything is controlled from the dock — the row of buttons along the bottom-right of the screen. Each button shows or hides a floating panel. Panels can be dragged by the grip handle (⠿) at the top, and their positions are remembered between visits. On a phone the dock becomes a tab bar and the panels open as full-width sheets.
Turn data layers on and off. 53 layers across 8 groups, plus a search box.
Filter traffic by altitude band. See the live aircraft count and feed status.
A key for every symbol and colour used by the active layers.
Point sounding (Skew-T), route cross-section, and nav log.
Enter your tail number for performance data; the query box if you have an account.
Pin your approximate location on the public map or drop a manual pin.
The site title panel. Shows or hides the top-left brand card.
Returns all panels to their default positions and shows any that were hidden.
Click Layers in the dock to open the layer rail. Layers are arranged in eight groups:
The search box at the top of the rail filters layers by name as you type. Layers shown in grey with · unavailable are known to have stopped serving data and have been deliberately disabled; they remain in the list rather than disappearing silently. The catalog is verified against each live source when rebuilt, and the date of that check is shown at the top of the panel.
Some layers are only visible above a certain zoom level — a zoom hint appears under the layer name if you are zoomed too far out to see it.
Some layers (METARs, TAFs, PIREPs, NWS alerts) only cover a defined geographic area, usually the Southeast. A warning appears if you pan outside that coverage.
The Altitude panel shows every aircraft currently on screen bucketed into five altitude bands. Click any band to toggle that band off the map — useful for focusing on traffic in a specific layer of airspace. The count next to each band updates live.
The size slider scales all aircraft silhouettes. The bar below the bands shows the proportional distribution at a glance. When the feed is unreachable the whole fleet dims and freezes — a held picture is distinct from a live one so you can tell the difference.
Below the panel the feed source line shows how many aircraft came from each network (adsb.fi, adsb.lol, OpenSky) and how long ago the last update was. Traffic data covers a radius that expands as you zoom out, labelled by a coverage ring on the map — that ring marks where data ends, so a clean map beyond it is not read as empty sky.
Open Weather from the dock. The panel has three tabs:
Click this tab and then right-click any point on the map to request a sounding there. The result is a Skew-T log-P diagram — the most compact way to visualise the full atmosphere from ground to the stratosphere in a single picture. See the Skew-T section below for a full explanation.
Enter a departure and destination (ICAO identifiers or airport codes) and press Cross-section. The result is a vertical slice of the atmosphere along your route: temperature, moisture and wind at every pressure level, drawn as a heatmap from the surface up to about 200 hPa. Useful for seeing where a frontal boundary sits along the route, or whether the freezing level is above your cruising altitude.
Enter departure and destination to generate a basic navigation log with ground speed, time enroute, and fuel estimates at your aircraft's cruise figures. Figures are planning estimates only — they use a single representative cruise value, not a full POH performance table. Every value is yours to correct in the Aircraft panel.
The Skew-T is the standard tool atmospheric scientists use to understand the vertical structure of the atmosphere at a single point — but its axes look strange at first, and there is a reason for that. Explaining it properly means explaining the shape.
Pressure falls roughly logarithmically with height, so a log-pressure y-axis means equal vertical distances on the diagram correspond to roughly equal distances in the real atmosphere. The tropopause, which sits at around 200–250 hPa in the mid-latitudes, ends up near the top of the plot rather than near the top only in miles-based coordinates. Pressure is genuinely spatial here.
A standard vertical temperature axis would send most of the diagram blank: the atmosphere cools predictably with altitude, so every temperature profile would pile on top of itself in the middle. Tilting the temperature axis 45° to the right spreads the curves out across the chart. The skew is purely a display convention — isotherms (lines of equal temperature) still run at a slope, not vertically. Temperature is not spatial: that tension with the y-axis is exactly why both the Skew-T and the 3-D atmospheric column exist side by side.
Work from the bottom up:
Alongside the Skew-T, the map can render the same atmospheric data as a three-dimensional column above the point you clicked — billboarded wind barbs at actual altitudes, colour-coded by temperature. This view is spatial in the way the y-axis is: looking at the column from the side, you are seeing roughly where the data points sit in the real air. It is the same thirteen levels, a different frame. Both views together give a more complete picture than either alone.
What this version of the Skew-T is and is not
This is a model forecast on a 13-level grid, not a balloon sounding. A radiosonde balloon samples the atmosphere continuously as it rises — it sees every thin cloud layer, every sharp inversion, every narrow jet streak. This site's sounding is a numerical weather model sampled at thirteen discrete pressure levels. Between those levels the diagram draws a straight line through air it never actually measured.
A real preflight weather decision — especially one involving potential icing — requires a proper forecast briefing from an approved source, ideally including a current area forecast and a pilot report (PIREP) from aircraft that have recently been through the layer. This sounding is a starting point for curiosity and situational awareness, not a substitute for that.
Open the Aircraft panel from the dock. At the top, enter your tail number and press Look up. The site fetches type, cruise speed, fuel burn and range from its database. Every figure can be overridden — your edits are kept in this browser, never on a server, so your tail number and performance numbers are private.
Below the aircraft data is a natural-language query box — ask anything aviation or weather related. This feature requires an account. Accounts are free to request and approved by hand; the queue exists because the query box calls a paid AI service and unattended open access is not workable for a hobby project.
You can also supply your own Anthropic API key (BYOK — Bring Your Own Key). A BYOK session runs entirely in your browser and is billed by Anthropic directly; the key is never sent to this site.
Aircraft appear as silhouettes rotated to their heading. The colour and brightness encode altitude band (see the Altitude panel legend above). Click any aircraft to open its detail popup, which has three tabs:
When there are more than 900 aircraft on screen the renderer switches from individual DOM silhouettes to a GPU-accelerated symbol layer; you will not notice the switch, but performance stays smooth at continental scale.
The Altitude panel's callsign / registration / type search box filters the visible aircraft fleet in real time. A search for B737 shows only 737s; a search for N372DC highlights a specific tail.
A coverage ring on the map marks the radius beyond which aircraft data was not requested. The ring is the point: the sky beyond it may not be empty — you just have no data. This matters most at a continental zoom level where a clean ring edge could otherwise read as the edge of traffic.
The guestbook puts a purple pin on the public map. There are two ways to sign:
You can add a name or callsign, or leave it blank and appear as "someone". Signing is entirely optional and the map works exactly the same either way. Pins expire after two years. If you would like yours removed sooner, ask through the suggestion form on the About page.
The Show visitor pins checkbox toggles the public pins on the map on and off. The visitors page shows everyone who has signed.
Right-click (or long-press on mobile) anywhere on the map to open a context menu with four options:
The site offers three unit systems, auto-detected from your browser locale but overridable in the Weather panel:
Your choice is stored in this browser and remembered between visits.
If a layer is greyed out and marked · unavailable, it has stopped serving data — this is intentional; the catalog is verified regularly and dead sources are disabled rather than left showing nothing silently.
If something seems wrong that is not covered here, use the suggestion form on the About page. That is also where you can ask for a guestbook signature to be removed, or suggest a new layer or feature.