Moving around

• Drag to move the map.
• Scroll or pinch to zoom toward the pointer; double-click zooms in there.
• Shift-drag or right-drag rotates and tilts around the spot you grab.
• No right button? Drag the compass: left/right rotates, up/down tilts. Click it for north up.
• Click an airport (or pick it in Go to) to fly there and show only its arrivals and departures. Esc shows all traffic again. Smaller airports appear as you zoom in.
• Hover a track for its class, altitude and time; click it to highlight it; Esc clears.
• Airline flights show their route (LAX → IAD) from the Virtual Radar Server route database, matched to the callsign and checked against the airports the track actually used.
• Lost? ⌂ Home or H.

About this map

Every aircraft track ADS-B receivers recorded within 200 miles of LAX on one day, replayed in 3D. One frame of the public record, not a complete count: coverage gaps miss some flights.

Data licence

Contains information from adsb.lol, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). The track file this page loads, flights-r200mi.json, is a derived database and is itself made available under the ODbL 1.0.

Privacy

• Callsigns, aircraft types and routes appear only for scheduled airline flights.
• All other traffic (private, business, GA, helicopters, police, news, military) is anonymous: no tail number, callsign, type or ICAO address in the file.
• Aircraft in the FAA's privacy programs (PIA, LADD) are never labeled, are not tagged to quiet airports (fewer than 10 tracked trips), and can’t be singled out in a close-up.

Method

• adsb.lol's daily archive, cut to the 200-mile circle and split into trips at gaps over 2 minutes, ground contact and new-leg flags; thinned to ≥5 s points, then simplified to within 100 m / 40 m.
• Heights are above mean sea level: GPS altitude on the EGM96 geoid, or (~2% of points, flagged) pressure altitude corrected with the nearest airport's hourly altimeter setting. “FL” only at or above 18,000 ft.
• Airports: a trip departed or arrived if it was within 3 nm and under 1,500 ft above the field.
• Classes (airline, cargo, business, recreational, helicopter…) are inferred from callsign, aircraft type and ADS-B category; there are no flight plans.
• Airline routes come from the Virtual Radar Server route database (snapshot a week after the day) and are shown only when they agree with the airports the track actually used.
• Vertical scale is exaggerated (stated on screen). Data is UTC; times are shown in your browser's time zone, with its abbreviation.
• Terrain: heights above sea level (about 125 m per pixel at the finest level), raised by the same vertical scale as the tracks. Changes to the source heights: the sea floor is flattened to sea level, while land below sea level is kept in the Salton Trough and Death Valley; there, a few source pits deeper than the basin's real lowest point (Salton Sea bed about −85 m, Badwater −86 m) are raised to it. Single bad pixels (one read 5,741 m near Perris) are replaced by their neighbours' median. Shading is a hillshade lit from the north-west. Major roads are draped on the terrain from OpenFreeMap's map tiles.

Sources

• Tracks: adsb.lol (ODbL 1.0)
• Airports: OurAirports (public domain)
• Routes: Virtual Radar Server standing data (CC0)
• Altimeter settings: Iowa Environmental Mesonet ASOS archive (NWS/FAA METARs)
• Geoid: NGA EGM96 (public domain)
• Terrain: Mapzen Terrain Tiles on AWS. 3DEP, GMTED2010 and SRTM courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; ETOPO1, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Mexico: INEGI, Continental relief, 2016.
• City names: Natural Earth (public domain)
• Flat map and roads: OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles, data from OpenStreetMap (roads on the terrain: motorways, trunk, primary and secondary roads from its vector tiles, loaded as you view)
• Rendering: deck.gl (MIT), MapLibre GL JS (BSD-3-Clause)

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