Live map of aircraft around the world, on a dark Leaflet map with a real-time day/night terminator. Planes are coloured by altitude, rotated to heading, smoothed between updates, hover for callsign, click for details, and a fading trail shows the selected plane's path.
OpenSky was the first choice but it can't be reached from Cloudflare Workers (522) and its free tier
caps at ~90s anyway. For a genuinely live map, functions/api/flights.js instead sweeps a grid of
points across the world's busy regions using the keyless community ADS-B aggregators (adsb.fi /
airplanes.live), merges + de-dupes by hex, adds CORS, and edge-caches 25s. No API key.
Coverage is feeder-dependent: excellent over Europe / North America / E Asia / Australia, sparser over remote oceans and quiet regions.
OpenSky returns ~10,000 aircraft worldwide, so the frontend renders only what's in view, capped at ~1,200 (highest-altitude first), recomputed on pan/zoom. The header shows total worldwide vs shown.
GitHub Action -> Cloudflare Pages project global-flights on every push to master
(secrets CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN + CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID).