Fuel Horizon

What you're seeing

• Each arrow is a real plane, pointing the way it's flying. Up close, they turn into airplane shapes.
• Its color shows fuel left, battery left, or height, depending on the mode you pick at the bottom. The key explains the colors.
• The line behind it is where it actually flew over the previous two hours.

Try this

• Click a plane to see its airline, route, fuel estimate and more.
• Search or ask. Type a flight number (UA123), a place, or a question like “longest flight”, “A380s over Europe” or “United flights to London”. Pick an airport to see a board of every flight heading there.
• Switch to Electric and drag the battery slider to see how many flights batteries could handle.
• Drag to spin the globe. Scroll or pinch to zoom.
• Replay 24h plays back the last day of air traffic, one recording per hour. Watch night sweep around the world as you scrub. New here? Take the 90-second tour.
• Share what you're looking at: the address bar always links to the flight, place or replay on screen.

Good to know

• Fuel is an estimate. Planes don't broadcast it, so it's worked out from the route and a performance model of each exact aircraft type (OpenAP, from TU Delft), tuned to match 126 published fuel figures. On flights it hadn't seen, it was off by about 5% on average. It plans fuel the way airlines do, with extra for a backup airport and 30 minutes of holding, so expect a range of about ±12%. Types it doesn't know get a rougher size-class estimate. See how the model was checked There's also an hourly fuel & CO₂ dashboard.
• “Electric” is a thought experiment: each plane carries a battery weighing the same as a full tank of fuel. With today's batteries, almost no airliner could finish its trip.
• Empty areas usually mean no receivers nearby, not no planes. Positions come from volunteers' ground stations, which each hear planes within about 400 km. There are thousands across North America and Europe but very few across Africa, much of Asia and the oceans.
• This is a snapshot. Each plane keeps moving along its route for up to 30 minutes after it was recorded. The live version runs on a computer with the Fuel Horizon server.