Show HN: Flight-Viz – 10K flights on a 3D globe in 3.5MB of Rust+WASM

4/1/2026 at 11:20:09 PM

Zooming on a mouse wheel on windows is nearly unusable, it goes from whole of europe to town level in one mouse wheel notch.

by whywhywhywhy

4/1/2026 at 11:32:25 PM

im on a mac and had the same issue.

other bugs: when i pan around (while zoomed far in), the planes arent in a fixed position on the map, they shift with the pan

ux bug: when i zoom in, it zooms into the middle of the browser window instead of where my cursor is.

by stingrae

4/2/2026 at 12:12:36 AM

I just modified zooming algo a lit, now it should improve your user experience.

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 11:40:09 PM

I will take a look to fix these bugs.

by coolwulf

4/2/2026 at 12:21:48 AM

also fixed the parallelex problem of route trail vs. the plane icon

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 11:26:15 PM

I am on Mac. Will try to get on a Windows box to test this

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 8:53:08 PM

Why is there almost no traffic in places like South America (other than Brazil) and Africa? Data set or reality? Not much in China/Russia either.

by ge96

4/1/2026 at 8:54:38 PM

The current data is from OpenSky, mainly north america and EU.

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 9:46:28 PM

There's something a little off about the projection logic when you drop into the Leaflet view, you'll notice that when you pan around after zooming the planes shift their location.

Very cool demo though!

by aduffy

4/1/2026 at 10:10:23 PM

Need to check my calculations. Thanks for noticing it.

by coolwulf

4/2/2026 at 1:17:15 AM

This is fixed now.

by coolwulf

4/2/2026 at 5:17:04 AM

How are you getting that real time flight data from . Is there a free source for this ?

by ab_testing

4/2/2026 at 3:17:34 AM

When zooming in and it switches to the lighter color tiles, the icons basically become invisible.

by c0nsumer

4/2/2026 at 3:34:53 AM

the airline flight number attached to the icon is in dark color and should be visible, also could switch to satelite view when zoom in, which is dark color

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 11:41:24 PM

For people having problems navigating, you can search flifht number on the left search bar. When click on the flight number, the view will jump over.

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 11:15:10 PM

Makes the divide between the developed and developing world very clear.

Edit: can’t be right. I think this is a dataset problem. China and Brazil should have more dots.

by christophilus

4/1/2026 at 11:32:08 PM

opensky database is limited. I need to find some data source for China and south America

by coolwulf

4/2/2026 at 5:11:39 AM

It seems there is very little flight data from China.

by moci

4/1/2026 at 9:04:00 PM

Impressive. The planes should probably scale up a bit as you zoom though, they become impossible to spot.

I'm surprised all the flights in the world can be represented in a <500KB api call

by maxwg

4/1/2026 at 11:12:49 PM

try change to satellite view it will be more visible

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 9:01:02 PM

When you zoom in to the street map level, the planes are practically invisible with their color and thin borders. Pretty neat though, that's a lot to load and keep smooth.

by ddoolin

4/1/2026 at 10:35:25 PM

If you switch to satelite view, the planes will be very visible.

by coolwulf

4/2/2026 at 12:58:40 AM

Did you pay for flight api? Getting comprehensive real time flight data is quite a monetary challenge

by concensure

4/2/2026 at 1:13:17 AM

I registered on OpenSky and using their API

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 9:22:33 PM

Wow. I won't give you a feature request :) just appreciation.

It really puts into perspective the magnitude of air traffic when you have this visualization.

by paulnsorensen

4/1/2026 at 9:05:35 PM

Could probably extrapolate positions based on heading and speed, to do some fake "real time" positions.

by lwansbrough

4/1/2026 at 10:31:29 PM

Really cool! Curious to know how you made it render everything so fast with barely any loading.

Good work.

by Glubker

4/1/2026 at 10:34:01 PM

:P just optimize to the extreme

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 7:09:27 PM

It render extremely fast on my side (firefox, macOS). Which UI stack are you using? Is it egui?

by pstomi

4/1/2026 at 7:19:52 PM

It's mainly eGui + WebGPU

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 11:00:10 PM

The wasm file (flight_viz_bg.wasm) was 10.94 MB as reported by firefox.

by Levitating

4/1/2026 at 11:14:05 PM

I changed a higher resolution image and that is why now it is a little bigger...

by coolwulf

4/2/2026 at 8:44:11 AM

If it's just the image, you could try using more aggressive compression?

by Levitating

4/1/2026 at 8:51:48 PM

Can you add pinch zoom?

by amelius

4/1/2026 at 8:54:04 PM

Currently I developed this for desktop browser, so it might not work well on mobile. But I will improve and update it.

by coolwulf

4/1/2026 at 9:12:15 PM

You should be able to do pinch zoom support for laptops with a trackpad, too. I think it would be

window.addEventListener('wheel', ... )

Fantastic work!

by pohl

4/1/2026 at 10:23:17 PM

Ok, I'm on desktop now. And I notice another "issue". When I use my mouse wheel to zoom, the point that my mouse cursor is on is not stationary. This makes it hard to zoom in on e.g. a specific aircraft or landmark.

by amelius

4/1/2026 at 10:30:40 PM

I can take a look. The current zoom is zooming to screen center. Maybe I should change it to cursor location.

by coolwulf

4/2/2026 at 10:33:37 AM

Yes, that will definitely be an improvement.

by amelius

4/2/2026 at 4:35:16 AM

[dead]

by AVA_Travel

4/1/2026 at 5:35:56 PM

[dead]

by coolwulf