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This is so very cool.
Nice work! I got lost in a clouds only view after setting my location but I’m sure I’ll figure it out, the first couple flights were over an unfamiliar area but worked fine.
I love this: the sound effects oddly are what really make it. It was quite something clicking a flight, turning round to see behind it, and recognising my location.

What surprised me is how satellites far away (in the night zone, it's daylight for hours yet) could still 'see' me, or rather, I could see them not even that close to the horizon. I would love to see how far away one of the objects is when clicking or hovering over it.

I love it. I use it to try to trick people into believing it's a live view, and that I work for the government.
Hi all! I'm the creator of Stowaway.live and I really appreciate you posting it here.

All this attention has maxed out my Google 3D Tiles quota, so the ground textures in ride-along mode are being throttled. Everything else works — sky, aircraft and satellite tracking, sound — it's just the terrain that may come in flat or missing. I'm working on a caching layer and a proper fallback rather than just buying my way out of it, and I'd take suggestions if anyone's solved this before.

Thanks for checking it out!

Since I'm here, the why:

When I was a kid — back when travelling still felt new and exciting — I would see a plane crossing the early evening sky and try to put myself in it. Not to go anywhere in particular. I just wanted to know what the world looked like from up there, right then, to whoever was sitting by that window.

The feeling was strongest at sunset. I'd be watching a good one from the ground and think about how much better it had to be from up there, above the haze, with the light coming in level. The same sunset from a perspective I couldn't reach.

Travel has lost most of that. Airports, queues, delays: everything wrapped around flying has got steadily worse. But the flying itself hasn't changed. An hour into a clear evening flight, forehead against the glass, looking down at a world you almost never see from that angle, and it is still one of the quietly moving experiences I know.

Stowaway is that part, without the rest of it.

I wish I could see Google Maps labels like this during a real flight!
Super cool. I like how you can hop from plane to plane. However, once I hop to a satellite, it seems like I'm stuck there. It'd be nice if there were more options from that point.
Pretty amazing. One of those great sites that is just "wow, I would never have thought of trying to build that". And I'm glad you did.
This is super cool. Made me happy to see what's up in the sky. Bookmarked for when I need a pick-me-up!
This is great but it would be useful to have some indication of cardinal directions - it is not clear to me which way I am facing.
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Mind genuinely blown
Truly incredible. How long did it take to build this?
Please add a way to put in my exact long+lat location. Currently it is a slider which is not exact and search bar does not show my exact location. I am hoping to see the airplanes out of my window and then see them in this app.
Not working for me on firefox on linux.

Console shows

THREE.WebGLRenderer: Context Lost. index-DMul8aia.js:3819:24355 Object { error: undefined } Stowaway failed to start

It also made firefox actually hard crash to desktop!

Thanks for the report, we'll look into it!
Now could you please sell this to all airlines to replace those terrible, terrible in-flight maps that they show?
Oh man, it took a while till i saw the button "Ride along"... but now i understand, nice project!
This is fun!

Some constructive feedback:

1. Maybe don't have the view limited by the position on the aircraft- autoswitching between sides would be smoother.

2. Maybe just have double-click on an aircraft initiate ride-along. It's a little clunky and took me a minute to figure out how to ride along as-is.

3. Some kind of overhead view so we could more easily pick out a plane we want to view from would be nice. As it is, I ended up firing up https://globe.airplanes.live/ to find the plane I wanted to view from, then tabbed back to your app to paste the flight number in.

4. Add "reticulating splines" during loading as one of the messages (old Maxis SimCity reference just for fun :P )

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Personally I prefer aisle seats. I am 6'2" and the slightly curved space on the window isn't as comfortable for me, same with some trains and busses. Yes the aisle has its own negatives but that's the devil I prefer.
The visualization for the aisle seat is much less interesting than for the window seat.

Maybe that's why they built what they built.

I wasn't positing "which is better?", I was just mentioning that some prefer the aisle in spite of the window view.
This is great. I've been riding along with the air attack plane on the Timber Fire near Big Sur, CA. It would be cool to see the fire perimeter overlay (like in app.watchduty.org).
This was so much fun, thank you.

Question for you, and I guess also if you know why Airplanes.live doesn't do this - why not show the destination? I get that airplanes.live is primarily tracking and the source system, (ADS-B/MLAT?) won't show the destination airports, but would it be difficult, at least for you, to integrate a destination lookup?

So there are some free sources I found for departure and arrival destinations, but they were wrong more than they were right, so unfortunately the only way to get reliable information is from a paid source. I may offer this at some point as a paid option down the road if popularity continues.