The sky is no longer empty — real aircraft now fly inside the simulator
For a long time our world had a strange gap in it. Sail along the Elbe and you fly past real ships — actual AIS traffic, at their real length, heading and speed, with their names on the hull. Look up, and there was nothing. Not "a few planes", not "planes in some cities" — nothing at all, ever, anywhere. Meanwhile the map on the very same screen, opened from the very same session, showed dozens of aircraft overhead.
That is fixed. Aircraft received by the Skydex Feeder Network are now rendered in the 3D world.
What you actually see
Each aircraft sits at its real barometric altitude, converted straight into the world's own vertical datum — an airliner at FL340 is nearly eleven kilometres above you, and it looks it. It points where it is really going, banks into its turns at an angle derived from how fast it is actually turning, and pitches up or down according to its reported vertical rate. The model comes from the ICAO type designator in the feed, so an A320 has two engines under swept wings and a Cessna has a propeller and a high wing; where the type is unknown we fall back to what the transponder says about its own weight class. Get within about nine kilometres and a small plate appears alongside it with the callsign, type, altitude and speed.
The part we care about most is the bit closest to the ground. Aircraft that report themselves as on the ground are placed on the actual terrain under them rather than at some nominal height, and the landing gear is extended on the ground and on approach or departure, then tucked away in the cruise. The practical result is the thing spotters have been asking for: park yourself at the end of a runway and watch real departures rotate, climb and turn out — the same aircraft, at the same moment, that someone standing at the fence is watching.
Where it works, and where it doesn't
Only where the network has coverage. These are our own receivers, fed by volunteers, so the sky is populated exactly as far as somebody's antenna reaches — and empty everywhere else. There is no paid data feed behind this and no per-view cost, which is precisely why we can render the sky continuously instead of rationing it.
That makes this the most direct answer yet to the question "why would I bother running a receiver". Because the sky over your city switches on, for everyone who flies there. If you have a spare Raspberry Pi — or just a Mac and a $30 USB stick, thanks to Skydex Feeder for Mac — that is the whole ask.
Two deliberate omissions
Private aircraft are not drawn. On the map they appear as anonymous grey blips, which is safe because a blip needs no identity. A 3D model has to be tracked from one update to the next, and that tracking is exactly what we promised not to do with private aircraft. Skipping them costs a few light aircraft near small airfields; keeping the promise is worth more.
Update 2026-08-09: private aircraft are now drawn — the feed grew an ephemeral per-airframe pseudonym that lets us pool a model without tracking an identity, so they fly as generic grey airframes disclosing only class, altitude and speed. The promise stands; the implementation caught up with it.
Aircraft with no altitude are skipped. If we don't know how high something is, drawing it means inventing a number, and an invented altitude in a flight simulator is worse than an absent aircraft.
The toggle lives in Settings → Realtime data → Aircraft (ADS-B), on by default. Ships have their own switch right above it, as before.