A hobby project by a Southeast-based private pilot and network engineer.
This site is not an approved source of aeronautical or meteorological information, and must never be used in place of an official FAA preflight briefing or any FAA-approved flight planning method.
It is a personal experiment built from free public data feeds. Data here is unofficial, may be delayed, incomplete, out of date or simply wrong, and can disappear without warning. In particular:
As pilot in command you remain solely responsible for obtaining and acting on all information required for your flight, including under 14 CFR 91.103. Use an official source: 1800wxbrief.com, Flight Service, or an FAA-approved application.
Live aircraft, aeronautical charts, airspace, obstacles and weather, drawn from public sources that are free and require no account — the FAA's own chart and airspace services, NOAA and the National Weather Service, the Aviation Weather Center, USGS, Open-Meteo for the model soundings, and a handful of volunteer ADS-B networks. Every layer is verified against its live source when the catalog is rebuilt, and anything that has stopped serving real data is greyed out rather than quietly shown as working — with the date of that check shown at the top of the Layers panel, so you can see for yourself how recent it is. Layers that go off, like weather and lightning, additionally say how old what you are looking at is, every time they refresh.
It exists because I fly a small aeroplane around the Southeast, I build networks for a living, and the overlap turned out to be more interesting than either on its own. It is a place to try ideas — not a product, and not a service anyone should depend on.
There is a guestbook on the map, and a visitors page showing everyone who has signed it. It is a guestbook in the old sense — you sign it deliberately, or you do not appear in it at all. Nobody is added to the public map by visiting this site, opening the map, or reading this page. Visits themselves are logged privately, which is described in full under what this site records below.
Two ways to sign, both starting with you pressing something:
Read this part before you press anything. If you press “Where am I?” and allow your browser's prompt, the exact position your browser reports is sent to this site and kept — together with the accuracy figure your device attaches to it. That is a deliberate choice by the person who runs the site, not an accident, and this paragraph exists so that you can decide with it in front of you rather than find out afterwards.
What other visitors see is not that. The pin drawn on the public map, and every entry in the “recently signed” list, is rounded to one tenth of a degree — roughly eleven kilometres — and is labelled as an area rather than a point. This is structural rather than a promise: everything the public view is built from is stored in a form that cannot express anything finer than that square. So the map shows a neighbourhood, never a doorstep.
The difference is simply who is looking. Other visitors get the eleven-kilometre area. The site's owner can see the exact fix, in a private view that requires a token no visitor holds. The same fix is also written once to the private visit log described below.
“Drop a pin” never touches your location at all. You choose a spot on the map by hand, so there is no fix to send and nothing precise to keep. If you would rather not share where you actually are, this is the option to use — it is a full signature in every other respect. Declining the browser prompt, or simply not signing, also costs you nothing: every map, chart and weather layer on this site works exactly the same either way.
Exactly what a signature stores
What the signature itself does not store: your exact position, your IP address, your browser or user-agent string, your city or region, a cookie, or a login. To stop one person filling the book, a counter is kept against a salted hash of your IP address — not the address itself — and it deletes itself within twenty-six hours.
Signatures are public: the pins, the counts and the names people typed are shown to everybody on the map and the visitors page. Please do not put anything in the name field you would not want a stranger to read. Signatures expire on their own after two years, and if you want yours removed sooner, ask through the form below and it will be — tell me roughly where and when you signed and what name you used.
Separately from the public guestbook, I keep a private log of visits. I would rather set this out plainly than describe the site as tracking-free and quietly do it anyway. It exists so I can see whether anyone is using the thing, on what, and from where.
Every visit, without being asked — the same information any web server sees, kept once per browser session rather than once per page:
Only if you press “Where am I?” and allow the prompt — the precise position your browser reports, how accurate it says that position is, and whatever else the fix contains: your altitude, the direction you are moving in, and your speed. Most browsers report only position and accuracy and leave the other three empty; a phone that is moving may fill them in. This is a site about aircraft, so it is worth being blunt about it — taken together those are not a location, they are a motion vector, and they are recorded when your browser supplies them.
On a phone the fix comes from the GPS receiver and is good to a few metres. On a laptop or desktop there is no GPS: the browser estimates from nearby Wi-Fi networks, which may be very accurate in a city and quite poor in the countryside. Your browser will always ask before any of this happens, declining is a normal answer, and you can withdraw the permission at any time in your browser's site settings.
This log is not published. It does not appear on the map or the visitors page, no part of it is sold or handed to a third party, and it is not linked to your guestbook signature. A precise position is kept apart from everything else, in a record of its own that deletes itself after ninety days — it is much the most revealing thing here, so it gets much the shortest life, and that is a property of how it is stored rather than a promise somebody has to remember to keep. The rest of a visit record expires on its own after two years. If you would like yours removed sooner, or would like a copy of what is held about you, ask through the form below.
One piece of housekeeping, so that the paragraph above is exactly true rather than nearly true: a handful of positions recorded while this log was being built, before 16 August 2026, went into the visit record itself instead of into a separate one. Any still inside their ninety days are moved out into their own expiring record the first time the log is read; any past ninety days are deleted outright and are not shown to me either.
There is no advertising on this site today, and there are no third-party trackers, analytics scripts or advertising cookies of any kind. Almost all the code here is served from this domain. Three things are not, and since the rest of this section is precise they should be named rather than waved at: the map library itself comes from unpkg.com, the map tiles from OpenFreeMap, and several weather and chart layers are fetched by your browser directly from the agencies that publish them — the FAA, NOAA and the USGS. Loading a file from any of those means your IP address and browser reach them, the same as visiting their sites. None of them are advertising or analytics services and none are asked to identify you. If any of this changes, this page will say so before it does, not after. Your browser stores nothing except the map panel positions you drag, a note that you signed the guestbook, and a session marker that stops one visit being counted ten times; all three live only on your own device.
Everything here runs on free public data, but the development time, hosting and compute are mine. If you find it useful or entertaining and would like to offset some of that, contributions are welcome and entirely optional. Nothing is gated, nothing is unlocked by paying, and the site works exactly the same either way.
Please note: this is a personal hobby project, not a charity, a non-profit or a registered business activity. Contributions are personal gifts. They are not tax deductible, no goods or services are provided in return, and no invoice or receipt for business purposes will be issued. Please only give what you would not miss.
I am not taking contributions yet. There is no payment link here because there is no payment link — rather than leave a placeholder standing in for one.
If you want to support what makes this possible, the volunteer ADS-B networks and the OpenStreetMap contributors are far more deserving of it than I am — and feeding your own ADS-B receiver to adsb.fi, adsb.lol or the OpenSky Network helps everyone, including you.
If there is a public data source you would like to see here, or something that would make the map more useful, tell me. Free and keyless sources are easiest to add; anything needing a paid licence probably will not happen.
Aeronautical charts, airspace, obstacle and navigation data courtesy of the FAA Aeronautical Information Services. Weather from NOAA, the National Weather Service and the Aviation Weather Center. Basemaps from OpenFreeMap and OpenStreetMap contributors, and imagery and topography from the USGS National Map. Lightning from the Blitzortung volunteer network. Aircraft positions from the adsb.fi, adsb.lol and OpenSky Network communities — all volunteer-fed, and all owed thanks. Aircraft silhouettes are derived from tar1090 and are licensed GPL v2 or later — a full copy of that licence is served alongside them at LICENSE-tar1090-GPLv2.txt, and aircraft-icons.js is served as unmodified, unminified source; one icon is additionally CC BY 4.0 by Peter Lowden. The map engine is MapLibre GL JS under the 3-clause BSD licence, served from this site rather than a CDN. Use of each source remains subject to that source's own terms.
And this site's own code and content: the page code, the layer catalog and the words on these pages are all rights reserved — they are not licensed for reuse. That is not precious about it; ask and the answer will very likely be yes. The GPL-licensed silhouettes above are the exception and carry their own terms regardless of anything here.
This site is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation any warranty of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the operator accepts no liability for any loss, damage or injury arising from use of, or reliance on, this site or the data presented on it. Nothing here is endorsed by, affiliated with, or approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, NOAA, or any other agency or data provider named above. Aircraft position data is derived from unencrypted broadcasts transmitted by aircraft and made available by public networks; it is presented for general interest and is not intended to identify, track or monitor any individual. If you believe something here is inaccurate or should not be shown, please use the form above and I will look at it.