Tracking the Skies: A Geospatial Demo with the Airplane Tracker

Written By Mazen Abugharbieh

Looking for a powerful example of how geospatial data can be visualized and analyzed on an interactive map?


The Airplane Tracker is a web-based application designed to demonstrate how flight data can be brought to life through mapping and visualization technologies. This project showcases a fictional air traffic monitoring tool—built not for live tracking, but to highlight the potential of geospatial data for business, education, and research applications.

All aircraft data used in this demo was extracted from ADSBExchange, a community-driven, publicly available flight tracking network.

What Is the Airplane Tracker?

The Airplane Tracker visualizes a snapshot of aircraft activity using key metadata—flight identifier, coordinates, direction, and altitude. The application allows users to explore aircraft positions and flight paths on an interactive map and filter the dataset by altitude, time, and aircraft selection.

This dashboard serves as a demo of geospatial data in action, illustrating how businesses and organizations can turn location-based data into meaningful insights.

Key Features

Aircraft Position Tracking
Visualize aircraft locations from a flight data extract

  1. Interactive Map Interface
    Zoom and pan functionality powered by Mapbox GL JS

  2. Flight Path Visualization
    Multi-aircraft trails with altitude-based color gradients

  3. Advanced Filtering

    • Select individual aircraft

    • Filter by time range

    • Filter by altitude

  4. Responsive Design
    Optimized for desktop and fully functional across devices

Why This Matters

The Airplane Tracker is a use case for how geospatial dashboards can support operational awareness, planning, and storytelling. This kind of visualization is ideal for:

  • Aviation and airport operations

  • Logistics and fleet management

  • Emergency response coordination

  • Urban planning and infrastructure monitoring

  • Educational tools involving geography or data literacy

Technical Overview

🖥 Frontend Stack

  • Framework: React with TypeScript

  • Design: Functional components, hooks, responsive design

🗺 Mapping Technology

  • Map Engine: Mapbox GL JS

  • Features:

    • Custom map styling

    • Efficient handling of many aircraft markers

    • Altitude-colored path rendering

📊 Data Visualization

  • Custom flight path rendering

  • Time range slider for temporal filtering

  • Altitude-based coloring with a visual legend

📦 Architecture & Tools

  • Modular Components

  • State Management: React hooks

  • Styling: Mobile-first CSS

  • Tooling:

    • TypeScript

    • Webpack

    • ESLint

Inspired to Build Something Similar?

The Airplane Tracker is a demonstration of what’s possible with geospatial data and modern web development. If you're interested in building an interactive map or dashboard for your own use case—whether tracking, analysis, or planning—we’d love to help bring that vision to life. Reach out and let’s explore what your data can do.

Credits:

  • Eyad Kurd-Misto: Data engineering, data extraction, and transformation from ADSBExchange

Mazen Abugharbieh
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