Flights Overhead

What is above you, and where it is going. Live aircraft within a radius you choose, drawn on a vector chart with no tile server anywhere in the stack. Callsigns resolve to airlines and type codes to aircraft, and a route is drawn only when the geometry honestly supports it — a half-known route says so rather than guessing.

Live demo →Setup Put it on a screen

Flights Overhead map panel: a dark minimal map with aircraft as small labeled icons showing callsign, altitude, and origin-to-destination route lines. — MapBundled coastlines, labelled traffic, honest routes.

Flights Overhead radar panel: the same airspace on a phosphor-green radar scope with range rings and a rotating sweep. — RadarThe same airspace, with a sweep.

Where the aircraft come from

Volunteer community ADS-B networks. They are funded by people who run receivers on their own roofs, so the polling interval is deliberately gentle and should be left where it is.

Where it runs

Self-hosted, read-only container. Coastlines, airports and airline data are bundled into the image — there are no map tiles and no API keys to obtain.

What it wants

A latitude, a longitude, and a radius. Aircraft dead-reckon along heading and speed between polls, so motion stays continuous rather than teleporting.

Setup

Put Flights Overhead on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — Plash and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install

Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

via Plash

Install Plash from the Mac App Store — it renders any web page as your desktop wallpaper.
Menu bar icon → Open URL… and paste the display’s address.
Leave Browsing Mode off so clicks pass through to your desktop as normal.
Plash reloads on wake, so it recovers on its own after sleep.

sindresorhus.com/plash →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk

On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.

fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at flights.livingkiosk.com/setup.

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`lat / lon`	env default (34.05 / -118.24)	Centre of the display. Needed together — half a pair is ignored.
`radius`	40	Search radius in nautical miles, 5–250 — also the outermost range ring.
`style`	map	`map` or `radar`.
`labels`	standard	`min` (callsign only), `standard` (+altitude, route), or `full` (+speed, type, airline).
`units`	imperial	`imperial` or `metric`.
`trails`	on	Fading track behind each aircraft.
`rings`	on	Range rings, spokes, compass letters.
`max`	250	Most aircraft drawn, nearest first (10–600) — worth lowering on a Raspberry Pi.
`dim`	0	Black scrim over everything, `0` to `0.8` (fleet-wide convention).

Flights Overhead is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command — the repositories go public at launch.