AINEWS
A Retro Radar for the Skies Above Your House
Tinfoil Pigeons is a free weekend side project that swaps the map for a radar and runs on open community flight data, a small case study in what one developer can still build on the open web.
Tinfoil Pigeons is a free weekend side project that swaps the map for a radar and runs on open community flight data, a small case study in what one developer can still build on the open web.
Type a postcode, and you become the dot in the middle. The sweep goes around every few seconds, blips fade in and out, and somewhere in the phosphor glow above your house, when the receivers have eyes, sits a real aircraft with a real tail number. This is the interface Tinfoil Pigeons chose over a map, and the choice is the whole story.
The product is a weekend side project from one developer who wanted, in their words on the Product Hunt launch post, "the romance of a real radar": the sweep, the phosphor glow, the blips fading between passes. Where most map-based flight trackers hand you a plane pinned to a tile, Tinfoil Pigeons hands you a green screen, a rotating arm, and the tick of a sweep that looks like it belongs in a 1950s war room.
The mechanic is simple. Type a postcode, the app centers on that location, and the radar starts to pulse. Each blip is a real aircraft overhead, drawn from the open community ADS-B feeds that hobbyist receivers around the world contribute to. ADS-B is the signal aircraft broadcast automatically, picked up by anyone willing to put up a small antenna. Tap a blip and you get the callsign, altitude, and heading, the same data the map-based trackers show, but rendered as a blip instead of a pin.
Built as a non-commercial hobby project on Astro and deployed on Cloudflare, Tinfoil Pigeons is, in deployment terms, almost nothing: a static site that queries a community data feed and draws a canvas. There is no app to install, no account, no monetization. The aesthetic is the product.
That aesthetic is also a deliberate argument. The maker's launch post frames the project as a pushback against the dominant map UI, which has become the default way almost every flight tracker presents the world. A map is a useful abstraction, but it flattens the experience into "things on a surface." A radar is a mood. It implies depth, motion, and the fact that aircraft above you are not a static thing pinned to a tile but a stream of arrivals and departures.
The honest caveat is that the experience is uneven. ADS-B coverage depends on volunteer receivers, which are dense in parts of the US, Western Europe, and a few other well-served regions, and sparse almost everywhere else. Coverage in rural stretches and over most of the world's oceans can go quiet. The retro glow is a chosen layer on top of real coverage limits, not a replacement for them.
The piece is worth sitting with for what it suggests about the indie web's current reach. A single developer, an open aircraft data layer, a static-site framework, and a free content delivery network can produce a tool that feels personal and purposeful rather than infrastructural and generic. The map-based incumbents are not going anywhere. The fact that one person can still build a working radar for the skies above a postcode, on a weekend, with the open web, is the small, legible news here.
For a non-commercial side project launched on Product Hunt with a small following at launch, Tinfoil Pigeons is less a competitor to the map-based flight trackers than a postcard from a possible corner of the indie web: smaller, weirder, and more deliberate about the feeling of a thing than about its feature count.