Tukuk-OS🛫 Live Aircraft & Ships
Planes in the sky and ships at sea, right now · live over the map
Live Aircraft & Ships puts the two things that are genuinely moving on Earth right now over one map: planes in the sky, read from the ADS-B signals their transponders are broadcasting, and ships at sea, read from the AIS positions they report. Pan or zoom anywhere and the layer follows you, refreshing itself every fifteen seconds — fly to an airport to watch arrivals stack up, or to a strait to see the freight traffic thicken. This is a live runtime, not a photograph: the dots move because the vehicles do.
Where the positions actually come from
Every modern airliner squawks its identity, altitude and GPS position on 1090 MHz, and volunteers with cheap receivers relay what they hear to OpenSky Network, an open research project — that is the aircraft layer, and it needs no account and no key. Ships answer a similar question automatically: a vessel’s AIS transponder broadcasts its position, name and course so nearby ships can see each other in the dark, and those broadcasts are collected on public receivers and streamed through aisstream.io. Our server sits in front of both, so your browser only ever talks to tukuk.org — no third party sees you, and one shared snapshot means a hundred people watching the same sky cost a single upstream call.
What it is, honestly
Coverage is only as good as the ground stations: over Europe and East Asia the skies are dense, over open ocean and remote land a aircraft or ship may go minutes without a fresh report, and a few aircraft (military, some private) simply do not broadcast. Positions are as-reported and can lag by a handful of seconds — this is situational awareness, not an air-traffic-control or navigation tool, and it must never be relied on for separation or collision avoidance. If the ship layer reads “not enabled on this server yet”, the free AIS feed has not been wired up on this box; the aircraft layer is unaffected and stays live. Ships only appear where we listen: one AIS socket covers a handful of lanes, and ours are the Malacca and Singapore Strait, the South China Sea, Tokyo Bay and Korea, the English Channel, the eastern Mediterranean and Suez approaches, the Strait of Gibraltar, the US East Coast, the US Gulf Coast, the US West Coast, Brazil’s Santos–Rio approach and south-east Australia. Open water outside those boxes is not empty — it is unheard, which is a different thing. Each box was kept or dropped by counting what it actually delivered on the live socket, twice, at two different hours: the lanes that returned nothing — the Persian Gulf, Mumbai, the Red Sea — are left out rather than pretended, and Shanghai and the Taiwan Strait sit inside a box we do subscribe to and stay quiet anyway, because no receiver there feeds this stream. Silence in one of our boxes is a receiver gap, not a statement that no ship is there.