I built a flight and ship tracker that keeps its own history

Description and use

Пользователь создалVelocity — самодечный авиа и

Problem

Free flight trackers keep shrinking their history: Flightradar24 requires a subscription for anything older than 12 hours, MarineTraffic cut its free window to 24 hours, and ADS-B Exchange ended its free API.

Outcome

Velocity provides unlimited, self-hosted flight and ship tracking with full history on the user's own disk, covering 132M positions in 27 GB of SQLite since August, with source provenance per contact, custom receiver integration, MCP agent support, and public archive retrieval back to 2024.

Workflow

• Run docker compose up on your machine with no API keys required
• Configure byte budget for history storage
• Point at your own receiver (e.g., tar1090) to fold in your own contact counts
• Use the 3D globe (requires decent GPU) or lighter 2D map
• Set up ntfy alerts for military or emergency aircraft entering monitored areas
• Query the MCP server for sourced positions near any location
• Pull public readsb archives back to 2024 for historical aircraft data

Evidence

Free flight trackers keep shrinking their history. Flightradar24 now needs a subscription for anything older than 12 hours, MarineTraffic cut its free window to 24 hours, and ADS-B Exchange ended its free API.

Source

It runs on your own machine (docker compose up, no API keys) and records every aircraft and ship position it sees to your own disk. Mine has 132M positions since August in 27 GB of SQLite.

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Drag the scrubber and the map rewinds; for aircraft it can also pull public readsb archives back to 2024.

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Each aircraft and ship shows which feeds reported it and how old the fix is, so a stale dot doesn't pretend to be live.

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Point it at your tar1090 and it folds that in.

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It runs as an MCP server, so an AI agent can ask what is flying near a place right now and get sourced positions back.

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Coverage is only as good as the public feeds and thin over oceans. The 3D globe wants a decent GPU (there's a lighter 2D map). And I wrote it with a lot of help from Claude Code; I review every change and there are 3,159 backend tests.

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