What you are actually looking at
Every aircraft on the globe is a real plane in the air right now. Commercial airliners broadcast their position, altitude, heading and speed roughly once a second over a system called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast). Thousands of volunteers around the world run small ground receivers that pick up those broadcasts and feed them into open networks.
God's Eye View reads two of those networks — OpenSky Network and ADSB.lol — and projects each contact onto a 3D Earth rendered with CesiumJS and WebGL. Aircraft sit at their true reported altitude, so a plane on final approach is genuinely lower in the scene than one at cruise. Icons rotate to match real-world heading at every camera angle, whether you are looking straight down or across the horizon.
How to track a flight
- Open the globe and turn on the Aircraft layer in the Data Layers panel.
- Spin to a region — a busy hub like Heathrow, Atlanta or Dubai fills the sky quickly.
- Click any aircraft to open its card: callsign, altitude, ground speed, heading and track history.
- Press the track button to lock the camera to that aircraft and follow it in flight.
- Switch to cockpit view and ride the approach down to the runway.
Because the whole thing runs in WebGL in your browser, there is nothing to install and no account to create. It works on any modern desktop browser; a discrete GPU makes the photorealistic terrain noticeably smoother.
What it does and does not cover
ADS-B coverage is built by volunteers, so it is dense over Europe, North America and East Asia and thin over oceans, central Africa and parts of Siberia. A plane vanishing mid-ocean almost always means it flew out of receiver range, not that anything happened to it.
Some aircraft also broadcast without a public callsign, and a small number of operators are filtered from open feeds. If you are comparing against a commercial tracker that buys satellite ADS-B coverage, expect this one to show fewer contacts over open water and roughly the same picture over land.
Who this is for
Planespotters who want a view no flat map gives them. Students learning how air traffic actually flows around a hub. Anyone who has ever watched a contrail and wondered where it was going. And developers — the whole project is open source under the MIT licence, so you can read exactly how the feed is parsed.
Common questions
Is this flight tracker free?
Yes. The aircraft layer works with no account and no API key. Optional keys unlock extras like Google photorealistic 3D tiles, but flight tracking itself costs nothing.
How many planes can I see at once?
Over 11,000 live flights are typically in the feed at any moment, drawn from OpenSky Network and ADSB.lol ADS-B receivers.
Is the aircraft data real or simulated?
Aircraft positions are real ADS-B transponder broadcasts. Road traffic elsewhere in the app is simulated and clearly labelled as such; aircraft are not.
Can I see a plane's cockpit view?
Yes. Select an aircraft, lock the camera to it, then switch to cockpit view to follow the flight from the flight deck's perspective.
Does it work on mobile?
It runs in any browser with WebGL, but the photorealistic globe is demanding. A desktop or laptop gives a much better experience than a phone.
Open the globe
No signup, no installation. It loads in your browser and starts streaming.
Launch God's Eye View