A hobbyist aviation tracking site — what it is, how it works, and a walkthrough of everything it can do.
A hobbyist project built around a simple idea: let anyone see what aircraft are flying near them, and build up a personal log of every flight that's passed overhead. There's no hardware involved — the site pulls from public APIs and community-run virtual radar feeds to populate its database, so all you need is a location and an account.
The database stores aircraft registrations, callsigns, route data, and operator details gathered passively over time. The more flights pass through, the richer it gets. Guests can browse freely, but registered users get a personal layer — their own sightings history, local stats, and live tracking tied to their specific location.
For developers, the same data is also accessible via API, so you can pull aircraft information directly into your own applications if you want to build something on top of it.
There's no physical hardware involved. A set of Python scripts run continuously in the background on the VPS, each with a specific role — pulling data from public sources and writing it into the database in real time:
Our system uses two different data streams. Live flight positions and basic telemetry are sourced from flight tracking APIs with global coverage. However, the rich aircraft data (operator, specific type, and callsign route data) is populated by indexing APIs sourced from community-run virtual radar feeders.
Currently, these indexing feeders actively monitor:
The Database Advantage: Because our tracking and indexing are separate, an aircraft only needs to pass through one of these feeder regions once to have its rich data permanently stored in our database. If that aircraft later flies over your area—even if there is zero active indexing coverage near you—our global flight tracking API will spot it, and the system will automatically pull its full historical profile from the database.
Most of the site is open to everyone — browsing aircraft, searching the database, and exploring the live map are all available without an account. Creating an account and getting it activated adds a personal layer tied to your specific location.
Once active, any flight that passes within a 5-mile radius of your set location is automatically logged to your account. Over time this builds into a personal record: every aircraft you've spotted, how many times, the routes they were flying, and timestamps for each sighting. You also get access to kiosk mode, personal stats, and API keys to query your own data programmatically.
Here's a walkthrough of every page, what it shows, and whether you need to be logged in and active to get the full picture.
The homepage is the live front door of the site — everything currently overhead, plus a snapshot of recent local activity.
A live list of every aircraft currently within range of the antenna, each entry showing its registration, an aircraft photo or silhouette, callsign, and live telemetry such as altitude, speed, and heading.
At-a-glance numbers for the receiver: total sightings logged in the last 30 days, and how many aircraft are active right now.
A rolling log of the most recently tracked flights, with each row showing the callsign, registration, route, and timestamp it was seen.
A dedicated page for active members that lists every aircraft currently being tracked within your set location, with full detail on each one rather than the condensed homepage view. Registration, callsign, aircraft type, operator, altitude, speed, heading, and route are all visible at a glance.
Toggle Kiosk Mode and the page switches to focus on a single aircraft at a time — whichever is currently closest to your location — automatically cycling to the next as it passes. Built to run untouched on a screen or TV, it works like a live overhead feed showing one flight at a time, in full detail.
An interactive world map of Flight Information Regions (FIRs), showing each region's boundaries along with the airports inside it.
Search by registration, serial number, model, operator, or callsign. As a guest, you have full read access to the database — every aircraft, route, and operator record is browsable without an account.
Active members get an additional layer on top of every result. Look up a registration and the page shows not only the aircraft's database record, but also your personal sighting history for it — how many times it's flown over you, each timestamp, and a map of its routes. Search a callsign and the same applies, with your overhead sighting log for that specific flight shown alongside the database entry.
Your personal sightings dashboard — a complete record of every aircraft and callsign that has passed within range of your set location, automatically logged over time without any manual input.
A browsable catalogue of every aircraft manufacturer and model in the database, built up over time as aircraft are indexed from the feeder network. This page isn't tied to any individual account — the data is the same for everyone, giving a broad picture of what's been recorded across all tracked airspace.
An alphabetical breakdown of every country represented in the database, showing how many airlines are registered there and the total size of their combined aircraft fleet. It's a useful way to get a sense of which nations have the heaviest footprint in the tracked data.
Active members see an additional personal sightings column alongside each country — showing how many aircraft registered there have passed over your location, making it easy to see which countries' fleets you encounter most.
Drilling into a single country lists every airline registered there, along with each airline's fleet size.
If you're logged in and active, you'll also see your personal sighting count and last-seen date for each airline, plus a Recent Sightings table with the raw callsign, registration, aircraft type, operator, route, and timestamp for flights from that country.
Your account hub — where your tracking location is configured and your API access is managed. Everything here is personal to your account and determines how the site behaves for you.
No hardware, no self-hosted receiver — just a VPS running a PHP/MySQL web stack, kept alive by a set of Python scripts handling all data ingestion in the background: